The Lair

A good while ago (maybe six months or longer), I decided to write a small logminer bot. Nothing very special, most likely a solved problem; you’d contend. I’d agree. Parsing webserver logs is like constructing a text editor in 2007, most often a useless reinvention of something that has already been done to death. There are log mining programs aplenty. The world really doesn’t need any more. I could do something more productive, like sleep. Watch television. Read more comics. Or (at the time), write a thesis.

Yes, you’d say that. I know I certainly thought it. Yet, as these things transpire – it turned out that I did actually need this bot. Some logminers (hell, most of them) give statistical overviews of website visits. Problem status? solved. Other bots (like fail2ban or denyhosts) are used for security purposes. My bot? Somewhere in the middle. What I wanted to do was present myself with an overview of visits and (this is the interesting part); have the bot do some trivial cross checking if the access was legit. And by legit, I mean not a spambot and not from an open proxy.

By and large, the bot works reasonably well to sift out the most suspicious looking IPs from the scores of legitimate accesses. But a consequence of having the bot running is that I tend to get a fairly detailed, comprehensive summarized list of the most interesting accesses on a given day – something I wouldn’t have bothered to check otherwise. Of a few days ago – this included some visits via archive.org – the internet archiver.

Which leads seamlessly onto the earliest sightings for El Goog here. And although I didn’t really stop to work this one out till now – the internet archive is a place of fascinating discoveries. For example, Last Man on Earth (an old skool version of the fairly terrible I Am Legend). Lots more feature films (including Beat The Devil, which I haven’t seen for a while). Probably best to start at the movies and films index.

It’s like Wikipedia in fascinating discoveries and potential to waste time – but without the flamewars on every Talk: page. Interesting stuff.

Yes, that’s my pretence that I actually understand the French language – either written or spoken. I don’t.

So, I’ve been pottering around getting myself organized for le grande server move. Le grande server, where I have tons of flexibility – but at the price of having to manage most of the services myself. Yes, that one. I hope to depart from my coddled existence at the present host; where backups and server monitoring and all those things are taken care of by professionals – and strike out on my own.

What I’ve discovered is that having done more or less the same thing for any number of corporate entities actually means nothing when it’s your own personal little playpen. For one thing, since it’s my own hobbyist setup – I feel inclined, nay compelled, to push the envelope with new and strange looking configs. All of this leads to a predictably steep learning curve, since I can’t rely on muscle memory and a few years of experience to guide me through a familiar configuration file or three. When some problem crops up (as it inevitably does) I have to peruse random websites, rely on automated translations from languages with non-Latin alphabets (yes. really) and do all manner of frantic sacrifices to the Patron Saint of Setting Up Servers., It’s a strange feeling to be this ignorant and n00bish about the mundane business of setting up a webserver. I’m quite enjoying the experience.

If the webserver on this hobby setup goes down, I’ll probably get a few concerned emails (assuming anyone even notices). If a server at $work had gone down in similar circumstances; it would have probably meant a fair amount of lost revenue or whatever the accounting types use to indicate a very bad thing. Yet strangely, the effort put into making the server as solid as possible is pretty much the same.

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No. I kid. There’s actually too much happening and I can’t keep track. First and foremost, there is Benazir Bhutto. Yeah, it was probably suicidal to come back. She did anyway.

Then there is the slightly more entertaining (in a utter tosser getting his comeuppance sort of way) saga of a guy who’s name rhymes with Erwin. Because there is a sense of justice in someone trying to mete out an extra-judicial vigilante ass kicking and having the ass kicking rebound on them, right?

And to complete my descent from the ultra serious to the utterly innocuous – seven common medical myths debunked. Including that perennial favourite (which I intend to forward to my parents) – no, reading in dim light doesn’t actually harm eyesight.

There are lots of things that you’d want computers to simplify for you – but the obvious methods for simplification don’t actually work. For example, finding out if a user entered email is actually valid. The description and code involved (see here and the monstrous chunk of code here) belies the apparent simplicity of the task.

So it was for my own little task. What I wanted to do was write a general purpose method (in PHP, actually – but the language itself is unimportant) to infer the blog address, given a permalink. So, given any post URL – I wanted to find the address of the blog itself. You’d think that this was a relatively straightforward task. But, if the preamble didn’t alert you already, it wasn’t quite as simple as I first envisaged.

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So, I was thinking recently. Uncommon, I know. Savour the moment while it lasts. I realized in a blinding flash of the obvious, that “pass”, or more specifically “pass on” is an ambiguous construct. In fact, there are at least two completely different ideas that can be expressed with that phrase. There is a third construct, as tez points out – pass on is the formal phrase to use for kicking the bucket. But to concentrate on the Wordnet senses –

Pass on

1. To give, impart – “They pass on the parcel to their parents”
2. To relegate, defer or decline – “He passed on the unpalatable choices on offer”.

Why does this lingusitic oddity suddenly interest me? Well, it is remarkably like the famous Dinosaur comic on homographic homophonic autantonyms. Actually, even more interesting is the list of words defined as contronyms (same word, opposite meanings). via LL

Why this sudden interest in the unparseable? Because if you are trying to cajole a computer into understanding these constructs as they appear in written text, you need to figure out the context in which the words are being used. Specifically, you’d need to disambiguate the word – and, as those examples indicate, this is more difficult than you’d expect.

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Thank Gawd It’s Offal? Ornamental? Probably. But no, I meant Over.Except it’s not, really.

It only took 4 years, 1 month and 4 days. Ugh. And yet, although I say it’s over – it really isn’t. There is possibly another six months of life left in the carcass. Members of family and random onlookers are confused when I point this out – but the thing is that submitting the hefty document just starts the examination process.

But soul searching and searching for employment or chasing down seed money for a startup, as someone is hilariously suggesting to me, is for the morrow. Today I am off to … err .. have a massive hot shower, kick feet up and loll around in front of the TV. Hell yes. All I need is a pipe, comfy bedroom slippers and a tartan robe and I can be that grumpy old man.

And if the planets align tomorrow (and less likely, if GNER still functions); Ed should be visiting. So we can wander around York, get beaten up by the local BNP thuggies and otherwise have a merry old time. There is also a forecast of gale force winds for this weekend, which should enliven proceedings.

In any social encounter of significance, there are always things that I really shouldn’t say. No matter how pithy or accurate those observations may be, opening my cakehole inevitably leads to recriminations, raised eyebrows and the descent of an uneasy silence on the conversation (also see: dropping a clanger, putting your foot in it, open mouth-insert foot moment etc).

This then, is part of the problem.
Paul Graham »

Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them.

Of course, this isn’t to say that I have either good ideas or I dress unfashionably. (One of those is definitely true, I have the clothes to prove it) – but I hold an opinion about any number of things, some of which seem to fly against the conventional wisdom, or prevailing fickle winds of online opinion, or whatever you may want to call the consensus. Actually, so does everyone else for their little niche. As Scott Adams observes, everyone is an idiot at something.

Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

Even calling it consensus is strange. Take politics. An entire country could be overwhelmingly conservative in its political outlook. As these things work, the more liberal (or conservative in the opposite extreme, take your pick) congregate online. That makes voicing a conservative opinion online pretty much a no-no – lest you be shunned, called a rethuglican and all manner of other epithets. Substitute any other political divide as you see fit. I’ve seen this repeated in many different places.

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Yet another act in the umpteenth rehashing of “Yes, I’m a [random nationality]. My opinions – they are like a single falling leaf in autumn” kicked off recently. I’m slightly nonplussed why people actually think this is worth nattering on about any longer. Is this the same sort of misplaced optimism that has a website asking whom the world would elect? Because I don’t think the Americans are really interested in having their presidential elections determined by the six billion odd inhabitants of the planet; regardless of (or in spite of) what said inhabitants may think about GWB.

And since I made a reference to GWB, it’s only fair that I link to MoveOn. Which is taking aim at Facebook. Yes, new advertising scheme. The most disturbing part about this whole setup is that it may use cookie sharing (like Microsoft Passport). Help Pages here – a tad sparse on information. But really, if you’re in the UK – then this is pretty much nothing. 25 million personal records lost in the post. Yes – names, dates of birth, bank account details. The lot.

An interesting observation about news coverage of the data security incident. I know the field reasonably well. I probably can’t spot the sophisticated half-truths, but I can pick out the idiots. The number of idiots interviewed in the past couple of days about the incident makes me wonder if all the stories are spun in the same clumsy haphazard way.

And finally, ah, England. Did you really deserve to qualify at all? At least now you’re rid of that bumbling underachiever who allegedly coached you for 18 odd months. And on a different sport, the tour match scorecard almost looks like the scorecard for the Aussies in the tests.

Back in the early 80s when television was in its infancy where I grew up, the entire family used to huddle around the box watching sitcoms like The Jeffersons and The Cosby Show. Yes, the stories in each episode had variations; but you somehow knew that the familial unit would win out. There would be drama, the occasional piece of angst but on the whole it was as predictable as soggy, milk soaked cereal in the morning (or back where I was: rice and curry for lunch). Wholesome drama that can be watched by the entire family.

Ostensibly, this is everything that Californication isn’t – after all, I’ve seen it referred to both as skanky and X-rated (they may both be accurate). The show has thus far featured nuns and other religious figures in inappropriate positions at least twice, there is plenty of simulated bumping and grinding, occasional nudity with the genitals artfully masked by furniture props and the odd cuss word (gasps of horror at the last, I know). You can just about smell the outrage, the burning of effigies/placards and the cries of depravity if this show ever dared screen in a slightly more conservative country. Even now, you wonder how the religious right in the US hasn’t taken aim at the show for its nun-too subtle intermingling of the church and blow job. Yes, I spent a whole 30 seconds coming up with that pun, so you’ll read it and you’ll groan. Just like I intended.

Yet, fundamentally, this show is not a great deal different from the aforementioned Jeffersons and Cosbys. It is about the constant strivings of Emo Duchovny and his writerly life. There is a superficial veneer of sex and salaciousness, of the wild life, of snorting lines of coke, of vomiting on paintings, of smoking pot. Whatever. Essentially, David Duchovny (Hank Moody, the stunningly imaginatively named main character) is portrayed as a nice guy. He loves his daughter. He’ll do anything, he’s desperate to get back with his ex-girlfriend who has left him for a (surprised?) richer guy with a palatial mansion. There are more plot twists, but the shining beacon that is Hank Moody’s goodness shines through. Somehow, you get the impression that you’re supposed to be rooting for Hank to get back together with his family again because you know, that rich guy doesn’t care about the admittedly tasty looking Natascha McElhone.

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I’m more than a little late to this party – but it’s a pet peeve and I feel the need to vent. So here we are… yet another instruction on why trusting personal details to a random startup is a bad bad idea. Gather around, kids. This is fun.

Part 1: Ceiling cat Facebook employees are watching you. They know what’s on your profile, they know which profiles you’ve been visiting and it’s apparently a perk to be able to stalk people. Discount the last as Valleywag hyperbole (although no one seems to be rushing to deny it) and you still have an interesting picture. Surprised? People actually seem to be.

Part 2: People on your friendlist can be co-opted for targeted advertising. (More commentary here and here).

Surely that can’t be legal, you cry indignantly. Well, it is – if their terms of service hold up in court. They can pretty much do whatever they want according to that document (remember clicking I agree on that?). It’s their data. There is also an argument in the Slashdot comment thread about Facebook’s deletion policy for profiles – they seemingly promise to resurrect all the data if you should return from your fit of pique.

But I’m being both misanthropic and cynical about this. I no longer consider it my personal crusade to tell people to hide personal information (date of birth? permanent address? good grief, people! how many banks rely on your date of birth for one step of authentication?) on their profiles. There are two reasons for this – first is that it’s amusing to have articles on how to make out like a bandit with FB (translated – thx R for both links). The second reason is that people with lots more information out in public are low hanging fruit for the data miners and criminal elements that are undoubtedly going to invade. Cynically, it’s sort of like staying next to a herd of slow, limping zebras when the lions turn up looking for lunch.

If some inventive dataminer figures out a way to tie in Scrabulous stats to personal information though, I’m pretty much screwed.

People insist that it’s not the cover of the book that matters, but the content. But that’s not true. It’s not the content, it’s the typeface. It doesn’t matter what you type, so long as you choose the proper typeface.

All of you guys are idiots. Really. Just go away.

You just blinked at that and kept on reading, amirite? Ha! First anecdotal point proven. Well, not really.

This then, is my somewhat dramatic introduction to a programme I saw last night. The programme was a mini-feature named Helvetica – all about the Helvetica typeface or in lay terms, the Helvetica font. Why is it that an entire film has been made about the history of this still ubiquitous and surprisingly popular font? Because of its influence on subsequent font design, partially – and also because it gives a fascinating insight into the psychology and the thought processes behind the design of a type face. The feeling of a pure message, of calmness, of neutrality – all of those things can be (and were) purveyed by a simple choice of typeface for a sign or advertisement.

I really like this font. Not sure why.

See, the choice of font for any project is not straightforward. I too feel that there is a correct typeface for every job and strangely enough, my eternal search for the ideal programmers font coincides with the birth of this belief. The font that you choose to stare at for hours on end (be it on screen or on paper) has a huge influence on your perception of what is being read, on your general feeling of comfort (I hate handwriting fonts because they’re hard to read) and a general feeling of symmetry.

That last point is a little bit hard to explain – fonts need to feel right when displayed on the screen. Not all of them do – for example, this one doesn’t work for me. nor does this one. I also dislike the practice of using monospaced fonts for my editor, regardless of what the best practice may be. Sans-serif (with the rounded edge) works best.

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Ok, this is too hilarious to resist. York bans Bonfire Night. That’s tonight, by the way. Which is fine, really. I’ve been known to have a pyrotechnic bent in my misspent youth, but I honestly can’t say I care.

What is funny though is that I’ve noticed the number of fireworks set off this year have seen a marked increase. I’ve heard miniature explosions all through this weekend, as if the angry hordes of chavs who couldn’t set off their explosives under the guidance of the council (ha!) are blowing shit up anyway. Yes, I did call them chavs. I mean it. There was arson last year. And you thought stuff like that just happened with angry Parisian mobs, eh?

And in other news, the ongoing saga that is my thesis educational soap opera lurches from one crisis to another. For a change, I’m not actually responsible for any of it this time. And no, I still haven’t submitted because I was practically forced into a 30 day extension. Ugh.

First there was the political compass (where I am completely and utterly smack dab in the center), now there is apparently the new political compass. We were discussing the right-wing, left-wing nature of posts and topics in the lkblagozphere (term used without permission) and I displayed my usual bipartisan tendencies. I call this being a centrist. Those less kindly call it flip-flopping. We might both be right.

So we all collectively decided to do the new political compass test. Post your results in the comments kthxbai.

FWIW: I couldn’t decide what my country of residence was, since I’ve lived in the UK for a few years now. So I picked the UK. Perhaps that was an error. Perhaps not. I have no idea.

My scores:
Left/Right (This axis is quite like the familiar left/right political division. It mixes economic issues — varying from laisser faire to interventionist perspective — and social or “moral” issues such as recommending the death penalty to punish criminals. We choose to give “the right” positive values on this axis)
-3.6613 (-0.2204)

Pragmatism (This axis is much less important than the first. It represents a combination of philosophies you could call “pragmatism”, “utilitarianism” and so forth, mixing social, religious and economic issues. We have chosen to give an atheist, utilitarian perspective positive values on this axis)
+5.3560 (+0.3224)

So, to my slight surprise – I’m a little bit more far left than I expected. I thought I’d be closer to the center. To my complete lack of surprise, I’m utilitarian/atheist/pragmatic/whatever you want to call it. Again, though – the values -3 and +5 respectively aren’t very far from the dead center of the chart; so at least I’m consistent in that way.

Most stages of my life have a few defining works associated with them. When I joined the workforce a good few years ago; I obsessively read Joel Spolsky, related to a lot that was being said. In my more cynical moments, I’d nod knowingly at the themes covered by Dilbert. If there is one defining work that describes my graduate student era perfectly, that’s probably PhDComics.

So, yeah. Last night I attended a talk by Jorge Cham (he pronounced it Hoar-gay); a guy who does a comic about graduate students. Crikey. The allegedly monstrous training and skills development budget actually produced something useful. Huzzah!!

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I couldn’t resist invoking a Canadian artist (I use that term loosely) lyrics here; considering her large fanbase and all. No, not really.

It was billed as The Biggest Sporting Weekend for Britain; so in the grand tradition of looking dejected and woebegone on the Monday after, let’s just take stock, shall we?

1. Pre weekend teaser. Russia vs England, Euro 2008 qualifier. Result: England lost 2 – 1. Because looking good (or somewhat decent at least) on paper doesn’t really mean jack when you draw at home to Macedonia. For my next party trick, ask how Spain have been doing in recent football World Cups.

2. South Africa vs England, RWC. Result: England lost 6 – 15. Both teams executed their gameplan to a greater or lesser degree. The vaunted England pack didn’t really make a massive impact (guess that makes the Aussie forwards look even sillier, eh?), the Saffers won incredible amounts of lineout ball, England conceded too many penalties and … crucially, England had Jonny’s boot. The Saffers had Percy “lookit ma hair” Montgomery and the fricking fantastic Francois Steyn to do their kicking. Fair result, I’d reckon. For my money, I thought the Cueto disallowed try was legit, though the replays later indicated otherwise.

3. Lewis got pipped to the title. That lil crybaby Alonso got pipped too, but that’s a separate matter. After all the hype, the championship lead of several months – well, he didn’t make it. I suppose I could rumble on about the endless soap opera of “Why did he three stop? Why didn’t the team call him in sooner in the Shanghai Grand Prix? How did his engine cut out? Was it sabotage?”. I really like the Anthony Hamilton response about no one being unhappy in the Hamilton camp though. It is his rookie year, after all. And the commentator speculation about Alonso possibly stepping aside and retiring from the race if Hamilton had muscled his way into 6th place was all sorts of fun. (“Considering he’s going to leave the team as soon as this race is finished, you think he’ll listen? I think he’ll have some radio trouble if the team boss tells him to retire”).

4. Ronnie O’Sullivan loses to Marco Fu in the Snooker Grand Prix. O’Sullivan? An English name? Well, I never. But anyway. What it said. Perhaps one of the lesser known sporting calamities of the weekend, but there we are.

So, that’s umm.. 0 for 3 then. And on a somewhat related note, I got a new monster TV handmedown last night from my landlord. It’s so fricking large (ok, just 30 or so inches) that it dwarfs even my generously proportioned room. Thus, I am now forever scarred by seeing Graham Norton’s head at roughly double the size that makes for safe viewing. And capping off a thoroughly marvellous sporting weekend, Les Bleus lost, again, to the Argies. Yeah, the Argies play a bit fast and loose with the rules at times, they slow the ball down, prevent teams from running (which I personally hate to see in Union games) – but it’s not really like the French had anyone else to blame but themselves. Not that they will, of course – if the linked article is any indicator. The Argies had the French number from day one. End of story.

Ya know, 1997. Ok, so we heard about Dolly, which was rather cool. There was also the coup attempt in Papua New Guinea, Soundgarden breaking up, the ascent of Tony Blair, Hong Kong handover, some random blonde got killed in a car crash, some random Aussie committed suicide. Ok, so a fair few events but no more and no less than any other year.

Except – the term weblog was coined ten years ago. If I cared more about blogs, I’d be excited about this. As it was, I didn’t hop on that particular bandwagon till a good few years later. So a blog was really turn of the century stuff for me. But more importantly from a geeky perspective, Slashdot is ten years old. And Winamp turned 10.

I don’t really remember when I started using Slashdot (or indeed, if I did use it in 1997). I definitely was using it in 1998, though. And considering that Winamp was the only player around for the new fangled mp3 format; well, yeah. I was using it from the pre 1.0 days. I definitely started using Winamp by about November or December 1997.

Ten years ago, all those things. I have now officially descended into the “You young whippersnappers don’t remember the Great War, do you?” old timer territory. Has it really been ten whole years? A decade? Good grief.

update: Pissu Perera points out that some religious figure died (and was later beatified) and TinyLittleFascist points out that the first Harry Potter book was published in 1997.

If there’s one thing I hate about the area I live in right now, it’s the lack of decent supermarkets/shops within a reasonable walking distance. It seems like a very simple thing, really – but I actually like to cook. Not particularly domesticated, but I find cooking to be a relaxing activity. Go figure. The thing is, I have a strong opinion about the sorts of food I like to eat (and consequently, cook for myself) and that requires frequent trips to the shops.

I’d like to say I’m militant about fresh produce, but it’s something slightly more old school. I want to look at the item (not online and in pictures) and figure out for myself if I want to buy it or not. I want to see scanned labels so I can check ingredients. Unfortunately, the closest supermarkets that allow me to do this sort of thing are well … slightly far away; so I can only shop once a week at most.

So, sauntering down the road to get my allergy meds from the pharmacy yesterday, I noticed that a new supermarket had opened up enroute. The pharmacy is on Badger Hill, said location always makes me grin a little bit (remember badgerbadgerbadger?). It’s not a route I’d usually take, so I had no idea that a new Somerfield had opened up in the vicinity. Wewt. Obviously, I ducked into the supermarket to grab some food.

Went around buying stuff, noticed an offer for butter. 500g tub, I was told. Buy one, get one free.

Seemed like a fair bit of butter (an entire kilo?!) but what the heck, it’s an offer. I use butter in place of oil anyway, so I run through it fairly fast. So, grabbed me two tubs and went to checkout.

A while later, I connected the “Hmmm. That was a little bit more expensive than I expected” with “Hmm. The bag seems a little bit heavier than I expected” and realized that, in fact, I had bought two 1kg tubs of butter instead. How sickening fattening. But hey, it’s butter. Waste not, want not – maybe Salem and Mitzi like butter on their catfood.

When I got home, i had a slightly better idea. I also have flour, eggs, sugar, dried fruit and raisins (since I eat that sort of thing when I get the munchies). Why don’t I bake a cake? There is just one small problem. I can cook. Baking, on the other hand, is a black art. By which I mean that I expect my attempts to turn out of the oven blackened and charred. Still, I have the ingredients. I have a general idea about what I need to do (I tend to be just a little bit obsessive about figuring stuff out instead of following some prescribed recipe).

All I need now is some icing sugar and a cake tin. Oh, and chocolate powder, I think. Let there be cake.

This is going to be fun.

I find myself remarkably productive when I stay at home, devoid of the distractions provided by the internet. It seems slightly strange, but when I really want to get some work done (D-Day being a couple of weeks away, it’s not like I have a lot of choice) – I stay at home. I unplug myself from the internets, after having gathered sufficient material to get my work done… and stuff occasionally gets done. Oh and I play Capture-The-Flag Quake 3 with bots too. And Tetris. And the occasional round of DesktopTD. Actually, this isn’t about my bizarre work habits or my internet-avoidance-as-work strategy but about diet.

There has already been a post on circadian rhythms and diet so let me hop on the “near enough to be tangentially related” bandwagon. When I stay at home, I eat differently. Specifically, I make myself something to eat roughly (it’s an inexact thing) every four hours. Considering that I fix my own food, it’s really easy to time. Contrast this with the usual workday, where I tend to subsist on random vending machine and junk food eaten more or less every hour when I go walkabout. I also invariably eat lunch when I’m at home, since I can fix my own (hot) food. I got tired of the samey fare and long walking distances involved in lunch at the department a long time ago.

And in random IRC chatter (hilarious in or out of context), there was a too-much-information conversation about confectionary related skidmarks on underwear. No. Don’t ask how that started. Something about missing drawers and going commando, I think it was. That in turn led to interesting marketing slogans for various uh… bars. Complete with juvenile yet funny innuendo.

Snickers has “get some nuts” and Mars has “pleasure you can’t measure” (which works really well with the mental image of sliding a chocolate bar into your pants, does it not?). There is also the local favourite Yorkie bars with an interesting slogan. There is even an official military version of the Yorkie bar (with a slightly different slogan).

Any more confectionary slogans that work will with the uh… inadvertent skidmark theme? No? Me nether (sic).

Two cutesy adaptions (or derivations or mashups) that I thought I’d share.

Batman by Dostoyevsky. Fairly self explanatory, I believe.

The complete set of CDs from Mark Vidler’s mashups for download. I listened to CDs 1 and 3 last night. Some of them are rather bizarre mashups and the man appears to have a serious fascination with mashed up Michael Jackson (see what I did there?) but it’s all free!muzak!available!for!download.

Robert Jordan, RIP.
I’ve told myself time and time again that I wouldn’t buy any more books until he finished the damn series. The last WoT book I bought was Winter’s Heart, book 9. This was almost 7 years ago. Guess I’ll run out and buy the more recently released books 10 and 11. Will book 12 ever see the light of day? I wonder. RJ really was a gifted storyteller though. That alone makes his passing a sad sad loss.

And Colin McRae, RIP too. And to think that I had been going through a retro phase – been playing Colin McRae rally 2 (released in 2000 or so) for the last month and a half.

Our intangible riches – essentially argues that the rule of law and good social institutions are better at povery alleviation than lots of natural capital. Very very interesting stuff. I’m not sure I see how rule of law can be maintained without lots of government resources though. Government resources basically mean natural capital and/or state wealth. It also seems to me that gains due to development aid of this nature is going to be really really hard to measure.

And completely randomly, not one but TWO Chinooks did a low flyover when I was walking home last evening. It seemed like a training mission of some sort. The choppers were high enough to avoid rotor wash on the ground, but they were close enough that I could see the riveting on the doors. Was very cool. Also, the Chinooks flew faster than I had previously imagined possible. They didn’t appear to be carrying any cargo though.

Figure out that I am lacking a key reference paper for the stuff I’m writing about now.
Google Scholar and sundry other resources point me towards to the paper.
Determine that I need some special access to get the paper. (University has to have IEEE access, right?)
Try to figure out my (infrequently required) username/password. Fail. University server locks my n00b ass out.
Call university support. I’m told my password needs changing, but it cannot be done over the phone. A personal visit is required.
Grumble about leaving the comfort and shelter of my desk, saunter outside. (in daylight hours! omg. But supermarket has offers on ridge cut random meat flavours crisps and double/triple packs of Bounty/Snickers/Mars. Semi-win.)
Have password reset. I can has login nao? Yes, yes I can.
Head back to the comfort and safety of desk, armed with crisps and chocs.
Login to university account. Figure out account details for IEEE.
Rub hands delightedly, count instances of Gallus domesticus before their emergence and otherwise tempt the cruel gawds.
Visit IEEE, prepare to wield hammer of “download to disk” on the paper’s PDF ass.
You can no has paper for download. Not yours.
WTF?. I have access, damn you. You’re telling me I’m from the University. What’s the problem?
Your subscription type only allows download of full-text papers from 1998 onwards. Aaargh.

Some Mondays, you just wonder why the hell you even bother.

In my misspent childhood, I used to read Lucky Luke, the cowboy who could draw faster than his own shadow. In one comic, Lucky Luke and Jolly Jumper (his horse, of course of course) accompany a stagecoach. Unfortunately every single meal served by the stagecoach consists of two things. Bacon and beans. Beans and bacon. Bacon and beans ice cream. Bacon and beans flavoured pancake. The works. Bacon and beans. All day, every day.

Needless to state, that shit gets a bit old. And don’t even talk about the flatulence.

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There is no content here. None. Not that there ever was. I am merely breaking my self imposed silence for a while to note the following.

There was a Top Of The Pops 2 Police special last night. I somewhat shamefacedly admit that I could, in fact, sing along to about 80% of the tracks that were played. The only tracks in the playlist I didn’t know were the early punk era stuff. Ok, people. Sign #125 that drac is old. And we like it that way. My lawn. Geroff it etc.

I was vaguely tempted (when I saw the tickets advertised) to go see them in Manchester or someplace. However their tour is in September, so umm.. no. September is now designated as my month to panic and frantically shovel steaming piles of horseshit disguised as thesis chapters. October? Well, that’s when I stitch on my knee pads and prepare to grovel.

Also, Fool’s Gold and a six part documentary on the Stone Roses. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). I stole the links from Metafilter, although that discussion quickly disintegrated into a my-music-is-better-than-yours pissing contest.

And my recent listening has also included Genesis. Anyone spot a pattern here?

No. I didn’t go this year. I honestly didn’t see the point, since the weather was appalling for the most part. Very cloudy and windy. There was a fair bit of rain too. Instead, I stayed at home and watched out of the window (yes, I live sufficiently close to the airfield to allow this) and occasionally ran out into the garden.

Still, nothing like living vicariously through the Flickred up photos of others so I present –

Paul Nichols. Nice photos of the wingwalkers there.
PhilEAF92 (all photos tagged elvington)

Nothing very fancy – and I didn’t hear very many jets either – so all in all, I don’t think I missed a great deal.

Ah, the seven facts. I’m sure quite a few of the people who read this blog already know a couple of these. I may have even mentioned them before. I’m nothing if not unoriginal.

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I know I don’t blog very often about environmental issues. There are many reasons for this; most of which can be summarized as apathy and a distaste of the more militant tree-hugger tactics. No, I think global warming is (mostly) a man-made catastrophe waiting in the wings, yes – I do recycle and make environmentally conscious choices when I can. Just don’t tell anyone about the multiple flights back home last year, ok? But I don’t kid myself that I’m actually making an appreciable difference or helping stave off melting ice caps. I’m just doing it because it’s the right thing; not because I seriously think that sorting a couple of bottles for recycling will save anyone. Illogical, resigned to my fate and perhaps defeatist? Yeah. All of those.

And my uncharacteristically somber mood is due to a couple of images I saw yesterday.

arctic sea ice concentration in 1979.
arctic sea ice concentration in 2007.

Full archive. The pictures start from somewhere in 1978.

And in related news, Russia is making a play for a large part of the exposed arctic.

Been busy and bored in alternate spurts. I keep my idle hands busy with various amusements. The thesis work itself isn’t that interesting; I’m fast losing the will to live in the face of a wordcount to satisfy. The amusements, on the other hand, are worth documenting.

Everyone should know of Desktop TD by now. It’s addictive like crack, might be one of the few non-annoying uses of Flash on the web that I’ve seen (excluding Youtube, of course) and well, it is personally responsible for a lot of time wasted. A while ago, I was sent an email asking me to reserve my username for The Casual Collective; a new venture by the maker of DesktopTD. The Casual Collective offers (among other things, I’m sure) a chance to play a multiplayer version of DesktopTD. What’s not to like? I registered. A couple of days ago (after I had forgotten all about it), I got an email inviting me to login. Today, I played my first multiplayer DesktopTD.

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YSlow is an extension to Firefox. Actually, that’s not quite right. YSlow is actually an extension to Firebug, an awesome extension which runs on Firefox. Its purpose is to find out why your site is slow. YSlow. Geddit? Geddit? Never mind then.

Despite being just a tiny bit suspicious of cookie-cutter recommendation tools, I gave it a whirl. I like it. YSlow gives a useful overview and is certainly a great introductory tool to profile a site. There are some recommendations made that can be safely ignored; but that takes nothing away from the tool itself. As always though, the application/site developer (ie:, you) should know best about what might work and what won’t. In my personal opinion, rules are ok to break so long as you know why you’re breaking them.

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So, Facebook was down for quite a while yesterday. Since I’m one of the hip and trendy Facebook haters; I actually didn’t notice for a while. I usually interact with Facebook only when I receive notification emails. Headed over to my profile, saw that the app was broken.

Mild consternation. Muttered a few curses. Ran a few tests. Nope. App really was broken. Then started half an hour of investigation while I upgraded to the newest version of the library and futzed around trying to fix it. Predictably, nothing worked. So I just threw my hands up and figured that Facebook was broken. Went back to work. This morning, things are back to normal again. How fortunate that this is a fun application and my employment or emotional well-being doesn’t exactly depend on it.

Remember that rule about checking your own code before blaming the compiler? Well, this was one of the rare occasions where the compiler (or in this case, the Facebook platform) was at fault.

A tad more concerning though, El Reg is reporting that the outage revealed severe privacy flaws. More details. Where are your privacy controls now?

Supermarkets go to seemingly elaborate lengths to actually make stuff you buy off them difficult to open. It’s like … the law or something. Some of the more exotic edible purchases I make are bottled. Therefore, it follows that I have a whole range of tools handy to prise the tamper proof, spill proof and 100% proof tops from these bottles. Since this is ol drac we’re talking about here – I can’t always be bothered reminding myself of where I left the can-opener swiss army knife gadget. So I have occasionally resorted to jimmying the aforementioned tamper proof lids with a common or garden kitchen knife. For extra credit, the knife is serrated; which I’m pretty sure is against the Geneva convention. I have yet to jab myself in the eye with this juryrigged bottle opening strategem. A sliced finger, however, is only averted by dumb luck rather than any adroitness on my part.

So shopping for groceries a couple of days ago, I had no qualms in slipping a bottle of confusingly, yet intriguingly named “Sweet Chillie and Garlic – oh, all right, let’s make it sound less like spicy sugarwater by adding a Thai in there somewhere” sauce into my bag. Primary ingredient? Water. Secondary ingredient? Sugar. Somewhere towards the end, just before the preservatives? Yes, chillie. But whatever. It tastes decent and that’s all I cared. Enough with the judgement. I bought it and I poked it in the bag.

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I’ve been the proverbial one-armed paper hanger sans tea break recently. Not altogether unsurprising, since I’ve been goofing off with distractions for the past few months and now the moment of fail (or non-fail) is looming up ominously on me. Any number of comics from PhD Comics might work for this situation…

How about light at the end of the thesis tunnel or tv is my nemesis (dammit, Heroes starts screening on the Beeb today and I want to see what the fuss is about) or supervisor meeting blues (although usually, I feel smarter when I meet with my supervisor and immediately sink into depression when I read through my references again) and most hilariously the thesis outline (yes. I have seven chapters. Then I made it eight. Then I figured I don’t need a real lit review. Then I realized if I don’t have a formal lit review, the external will nuke me from low orbit. So I put it back in. Then I decided the middle chapter was too long and wanted to splice it in half. Aaargh.)

In other news, I’ve been using the marvellous wp-recentlinks on this blog for snippets links. Habari doesn’t have an equivalent plugin. Well, I suppose I could write my own but that still wouldn’t take care of the existing snippets. Since I plan on moving from Wordpress to Habari at some point in the not-too-distant future, I decided to port all 800 odd links (over 2 years) into my del.icio.us account and write a more generic, far less challenging del.icio.us Habari plugin instead.

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Last HP post. I promise. No, I mean it. No matter how amusing subsequent events are; I’ll restrain myself from posting. You know, people look upon my reading of Harry Potter with a mixture of disdain, despair and amusement. At my age? Reading a children’s book? The horror, etc. This is the ideal time for me to play the snooty lit-critic and say that the writing is shoddy, that JKR sucks etc etc. It’s not that. I actually do like the books. But then, I also read Da Vinci Code for the entertainment value; so take this with a pinch of albino monk.

No, the most fun is reading the reactions before, during and after release. I alluded in an earlier post to the wildly overused phrase “internet history”. But it’s really true. Each book release was a larger and larger event, as the hype machine took over. The fan fiction (which I have mostly avoided); the ships – it all contributed to the buildup.

So this is not really anything original, but more a pointer to the hilarious outpouring of emotion (call it wank, everyone else does).

Oh that Epilogue was kind of not that great, but the anger it will engender (and the amusement I will draw from said anger) will probably make up for it.
Probably? Who am I kidding?

(source).
Word. I’ve stopped pretending to work, I’ve found myself some food, and I’m ready to trawl through the anguish. Onward.

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Yes, more HP7. I can’t stay away from the soap opera, the claims, the counter-claims. The accusations, the cries of betrayal, the inconsistencies in dialogue and plot points touted as proof of a fake. It’s wonderful internet history.

Yes, there may be spoilers. Usual warning applies – I try to keep the references vague and only link to spoilers instead of mentioning them in text.

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Harry Potter 7. Yes, it’s been available for a couple of days now. Yes, I’m reading one of the dodgiest copies around. Slowly, labouriously. Why? Can’t I wait another 4 days? I don’t know really. It just seems useful to get the read out of the way during the week, for some inexplicable reason. It’s actually a lot like Order of the Phoenix in pace thus far (I’m about three quarters of the way through). Minor spoilers and links to major oopsie level spoilers follow, so stop reading if you don’t want to know.

BEWARE. HERE BE SPOILERS AND OTHER DEMONS.
But then, it could all be an elaborate hoax. Your mileage may vary. I’d certainly laugh long and loud if this book turns out to be a fake.

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Ok. I get the fact that we need to protect kids from some influences. That’s the whole point of having authority figures. I get that. I really do. But sometimes you have to wonder …

Borders asked to ban “racist” Tintin book. Tintin? Seriously? Apparently so. Yet another facet of my childhood (who didn’t read Tintin when they were growing up?) has now been swamped by the PC brigade. Sickening.

Actually, I have read Tintin in the Congo, the comic in question. Does it have dodgy cultural references? Yep, I’m pretty darn sure it does. It fits perfectly with the other national and racially stereotypical names that Herge adopted for the other characters in the series. Try Chang, the obscurely named Chinese companion of Tintin. Or Rastapopulous, the big nosed arch villian of the piece. Or Abdullah, the mischievous Mid-eastern kid with the megarich father. Or my personal favourites; Generals Alcazar and Tapioca from San Theodoros. Stereotyped? Yup. Funny? Yes, I think so.

That’s actually not all.

The PC brigade have also had a go at Noddy and Tinky Winky of the Teletubbies. Right. So, there’s really no excuse to be watching the Teletubbies at any age. I send the nieces Disney DVDs just to get them to watch something else. I’m doing my bit to rid the world of the menace. I still think I made my point about political correctness gone mad.

Eejits. My lawn. Get off it.

I’ve just backed up my backups. I never want to do that again.

My backup strategy for various odds and ends used to be so simple, really. Throw random things onto a special folder on my hard disk. Check the size of the folder from time to time. When the size of the folder reaches 650mb or so; break out a blank CD, burn contents, add contents to catalog and store CD securely in the case. Delete folder. Whenever I need something, I search the catalog; find the file(s) I need, flip through the alphanumerically sorted CDs till I find the one I want, grab the files I need off the CD and I’m done.

Simple, right? Just needs a bit of organization upfront, but it pays off. I’ve been using this system for years – mostly with some homegrown cataloging software that works across both Unix and Windows.

Unfortunately, my download habit didn’t allow this happy state of affairs to continue. I realized this when I went down to my last 10 CDs from a 100 CD pack. So, a new backup approach was required. Bought a portable hard disk and thought, hey – I’ll just transfer all the CDs contents onto the hard disk and I’m done.

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Feds in 5. Bet you not many people could have called that. I actually thought Nads would grab the Championship by the short and curlies, considering how Feds nearly imploded in the 4th set. I think the manufacturers of Hawkeye must be pleased, at least.

Predictably, Venus over Bartoli. I had the completely unchallenging task of calling this one early and I did.

Bakary Sagna to the Emirates. Too little, too late? I’d be happier if Babel was signed too – but that seems unlikely now. And although I’ve resisted commenting on the Henry saga thus far, let me just say that he could have fetched a few million more at the start of last season – maybe more than 20.

this comic really works for me right now.

I’m waking upto the fact that I’ll need to move out of York at some point in the not too distant future. I already have a gigantic logistical dilemma with several indiscreet literary purchases. So what do I do? Buy more books, of course. I already have a logistical problem, why quibble about a book or three more to add to the pile?

Except this most recent purchase is entirely practical. I’ve already transitioned most of my reading to the electronic variety; but there are some books that simply cannot be used that way – one such being the Jane’s Aircraft Recognition Guide. Ok, so I couldn’t buy the 5th edition which is due out in September so I settled for the fourth edition. Yes, I’m buying the 5th edition too, when it comes out. Stop staring at me like that.

It’s not exactly All the World’s Aircraft, 2007 but I’ll settle.

Why do I need another Janes book? What’s with the rush? Elvington is in August.

I’ve been guzzling bitter lemon recently. The label proclaims in large lettering that the drink contains quinine. Yes, the product of the cinchona tree which has anti-malarial properties. A bit of investigation revealed that it is in fact a standard component in both bitter lemon and tonic water.

Slightly related, cannabis is banned in Indonesia. However, traditional use in cooking (ie:, sprinkling in a curry) is endorsed. This is inspite of the fact that TCHC is far more potent when ingested (while dissolved in butter or other lipids) than when it is smoked.

And since I couldn’t resist – foie gras poutine with horse fat fries. The picture looks marvellous. Deadly to arteries, of course – but still very tasty. But it’s horse. And eating horsemeat is a controversial practice, for reasons which elude me. Something about being companion animals or something. I suppose it helps that I’ve never actually owned a horse (although I have ridden them a few times). Now foie gras? I’m much less comfortable with eating it now that I’ve seen how it is umm.. prepared.

It’s a weird world of contradictions and I’m still trying to recouncile my positions on various foods and make it a touch more consistent. I’m mostly indifferent to the practice of battery farming (widely accepted as cruel). I’d certainly try horsemeat at least once. Yet once I saw how the geese cowered and ran away from the feeding tube; I felt a tad squeamish about the foie gras that I’d eaten. It honestly makes no sense, but there you are.

If I wanted more evidence of the conflicts and inconsistencies in food ingredients, I could point to the charming (and apparently nutritious) preparation of human breast milk cheese. Read the comments on that entry and you’ll understand.

My landlord recently revived his hobby of astronomy. To this end, he shopped around last year and bought one of the higher-end state of the art reflective telescopes around.

If anyone has seen the stereotypical long brass tube that comprises the Gallilean telescope – well, modern day astronomy, even amateur astronomy, is now far far removed from this hoary image. Telescopes can be (and are) controlled automatically. They have motorized controls, they make minute automatic adjustments to compensate for everything (including the rotation of earth) and they also include automatic tracking software which enables alignment and automatic seeking of celestial objects in the sky.

In short, they’re extremely sophisticated pieces of kit. They also need a fair bit of non-trivial setting up. This is probably why we’re still using fairly powerful binoculars instead of the proper telescope – it has so many components to set up that the whole job takes ages.

A couple of days ago, he yelled upstairs and said that Jupiter was visible. This seemed sort of odd to me; I thought that Mars and Venus were the only planets visible to the naked eye. So I went downstairs and we booted up the laptop containing the software (not the telescope, just the tracking software) and had a peek. It was almost a full moon; so the brilliance of the planet next to the moon’s silvery light seemed even more astonishing. Yup. The software said it was Jupiter alright.

Which brings me neatly to apparent magnitude – the apparent brightness of objects as seen from earth. Turns out that Jupiter is actually the third brightest object in the sky; even if it is quite far away.

Learn something new every day.

Desktop TD 1.5 was released a couple of days ago. I’ve been obsessed with that game for a while now – it’s taken the place of Tetris and a few other games that I play to switch jobs for short sharp spurts. A bit of background, the creator recently left his real job to focus on online games. As such, I realized that some degree of commercialization was inevitable – but I was optimistic about the gameplay being mostly unaffected.

I think I was wrong. There has been a mini-furore about the over-commercialization of the game. Personally, I don’t care about the tiny Ks floating around the screen or the rather ostentatious kongregate pass on the desktop background. What annoys me the most is that offline play (that is, downloading the swf and playing offline) has now been disabled. I’m going back to 1.2b.

In other news, I’ve written recently about downloading Safari – the browser formerly available only on Apple’s own Mac OSX. I have to say that my experience so far has been surprisingly positive. It’s quick to load and minimalistic; two useful traits for an application which would spend a lot of time on my desktop. Unfortunately, Safari 3.0.2 beta horribly mangles proxy support (again!). So I looked around a little bit and found this nifty Webkit Nightly Download site. Another great reason to run a nightly build instead of the beta – a new web inspector which looks very tasty indeed.

And completely randomly; it was Paul Gallico who spake thusly – “No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute. (NY Times 14 Jan 1962)”. So why is the British government now deciding on the opposite? Quite apropos, last night’s Balderdash and Piffle featured the earliest sightings of some interesting putdowns and insults (plonker, wassock and tosser among them). This reminds me a bit of the fuss over the Seven Sins of England last month.

Yes, I recently hopped on yet another bandwagon as some of you may well know. I decided to check out what the huge fuss was all about – I started poking around the Facebook API and wrote an application.

Is it a big deal? I rather think it is . There are reports of teething troubles aplenty and I discovered some limitations in the documentation – but overall, I really like the concept of being able to wrestle with the innards of a social networking application. It was fairly frustrating to figure things out, but ultimately it is an interesting experience. I’m still coming to grips with the possibilities.

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I’ve been lurking around Facebook again. The fancy seems to strike me in fits and starts. I resisted for as long as I could but I am now gripped in the throes of addiction. Well, I still don’t know what people actually do there – but like the cat chasing the feebly squeaking mouse because it can – I too have launched myself head-first into the Facebook era.

Sans a picture, though. There are limits to my online perversions. There have been odd wall posts berating me for not including a photograph. It’s Facebook – because you’re supposed to have photographs. Of your face. Who knew? If my face were akin to an open book of any sort, it would most likely be illegal.

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A bit of a nothing post, really – but I thought it would be moderately useful to document the development tools for the three four major browsers that are available in the Windows world.

Firefox – use Firebug. Nuff said. Honestly, this is pretty much all you need. It allows pretty much everything that you’d need for JavaScript, CSS and general mucking around with pages. Perhaps Web Developer comes close; but nothing else does. There are lots more development extensions related extensions for Firefox; Google should reveal the more obvious candidates.

Internet Explorer – use the Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer. It’s by Microsoft, it’s free. Not great, but it does the job. Non-free but closer to Firebug in functionality, IE Inspector offers a couple of tools which function as Internet Explorer addons. The debugger is sort of weird, but it works. IE is still inscrutable to me though. No browser gives me as many headaches with layouts.

Opera – there are plenty of tools for developers in the Tools Section – I actually like the DOM tool implemented by Opera more than I do the equivalents in other browsers. That’s purely a matter of personal taste, though.

Safari – just enable the debug menu. It is disabled and hidden by default, but enabling is just a matter of setting the right preference. On the Mac, however – you’d need to use the defaults utility – on Windows, you’d need to edit the Preferences.plist file as explained here. The debug menu on Windows contains a user agent switcher, a JavaScript console and couple of other features (Snippets? Site Specific Hacks?) that I haven’t quite worked out yet. The JS console is pretty much essential of course – the Webkit JavaScript implementation is somewhat strange (and has never worked for me, despite targetting KHTML/Konqui).

I still think Firefox edges it for sheer breadth of development tools available, but the more you know eh?

So, a couple of days ago – I decided that I would try out the day without Google. Well, the challenge was specifically a day without the 5 major search engines, but in my case – that means el Goog.

I don’t have any toolbars or home page settings to Google, in fact – I only use Google in one very simple, specific way. I have a Smart Bookmark which allows me to type something like this …

google alternate search engines

on my Firefox address bar – yielding the Google SERP for alternative search engines.

Clearly, I knew that muscle memory would win out if I left the smart bookmark unchanged, so at the start of the day – I edited the Google bookmark to search Clusty instead. To make the test complete; I also disabled my smartmark searches for Google Images, Google News and Google Groups. I also wired in additional smartmarks for Alltheweb and Hakia. I would have also loved to use Powerset, but alas – they don’t have a public search offering just yet.

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Go get it

Yeah, yeah, Firefox and Opera rule. I know it, so do you. But Safari uses a customized version of KHTML; the engine also used by Konqueror. More to the point, Safari also has quite a few quirks in how it seems to handle JS; at least the brand of JS that I write – so I’m looking forward to testing out some of my code on Safari.

And oh, they say it’s blazingly fast. [cue Slashdot response: but does it run on Linux?]

Update 1: Requires administrator privileges to install? A browser? Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell are you, Internet Explorer?

Update 2: Multiple vulnerabilities found. So, I shouldn’t be using Safari anymore, huh?

And surprise, surprise, I’m not talking about the weather. Yet.

Alt Search Engines wants everyone to stop using “the five major search engines”, just for tomorrow. Actually, I intend to follow that – I think my Google usage is fairly low and I’m looking forward to giving Clusty and a few other contenders a go.

This will also help me determine my stage of Google addiction. Place it accurately on a scale of coffee, watching pointless television, heroin, Warcraft 3 and mindless coding procrastination. I’ll be able to find out tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to a day of cold turkey though.

Vaguely Goog related, an interview with their search quality team.

Oh and I’m now wondering if the hype about that boy Hamilton is justified. Just a thought. Oh and mad mad props to CY for calling the result [ok, not too hard, but still a 50-50 chance] and predicting the number of sets to take the win in the French Open men’s singles. woo. I thought Feds would take Nads to 5 sets meself. And err. this is article gives the Nads butt grabbing wedgie theory a bum’s rush.

I was watching Eurovision a few weeks ago when Terry Wogan intro-ed the segment where the votes were presented.

He said – ok, now you can shout at your TV.

I was eating dinner at the time and I remember being amused at the very idea. Shout at the TV? What does this Wogan chap think I am, uncivilized?

So the vote for Scooch was less than great; I’m sure patriotic Brits would have been shouting at their TV. Me? I was unmoved. Ok, so I cheered a little bit when the hapless Maltese gifted us 12 points. But that’s it.

Fast forward a few weeks later and Beckham won a recall to play at the Brazil-England game at the Wembley. A bit of background, I am most emphatically not on the bring Becks back bandwagon. In fairness though, the guy has earned his place, he’s done the job better than most – recently against Estonia.

Be that as it may, the prematch conversation had started and then Alan Hansen produced this genius piece of fancy verbal footwork. Speaking of the McClaren decision to bring Becks back, he said (paraphrased roughly) “Well, we never said dropping Becks was a good decision, we just said it was a BIG decision“. Umm. Yeah. He never said anything like “Beckham has to go.“. No sir.

What did I do? I squawked in outrage at the TV. Poor innocent TV.

And then, that awesome Apprentice semi-final last night. Where the much despised Katie was told that she was in the final. What did I do?

I shouted at the TV. More like wailed in anguish actually.

Which goes to show that I’m completely unaccustomed to watching television in a family room now.

Ed, don’t read after this bit. It’s a spoiler. You have been warned.

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After the professionals have passed out, repeatedly *headdesk*-ing themselves into unconsciousness.

But more seriously, I saw an entertaining interview last night which featured Andrew Keen, the author of Cult of the Amateur. In summary, an influx of amateur video editors, bloggers, journalists and pretty much every other profession into the internet is causing a surfeit of mediocrity. And horrendously long sentences like that one. It’s too easy to dismiss this as just another rant by someone who resents the usurpation of his journalistic soapbox. Wait. Another horrendously long sentence. *sigh*. It’s all a bit shite, basically – and I’m not talking about my sentence structure either.

Actually, I read Andrew Keen’s blog regularly and he makes some excellent discussion points (I read it on the internet, blogs are boring [and he hasn't even read mine, does he know what a massive datapoint he's missing?] and McLuhan’s Revenge are particularly interesting).

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What is it about that South African pulling wool over all our eyes? Turns out he wasn’t killed after all. Yes, Woolmer. Remember him? That’s the guy that I thought (and made a bet, to boot) had been crisped by Aloo. The guy that was supposedly given snake venom. The guy who apparently had a towel wrapped around his throat and was strangled.

No wait. Turns out he may have died of … natural causes.

Ok. So did the Jamaican coroner suddenly stop handling the ball, stare off into the distance like Horatio Kane, take off his sunglasses and say …

“Someone wrapped a boundary rope round his neck, mon.”
[Yeah. I do a horrible Jamaican impersonation. Don't carribbean it in.]

Talk about dropping a sitter, eh? (I really really wanted to work in a hit wicket reference but my pun-fu is weak today). As it is, will anyone believe what the coroner has to say on the matter? If someone did actually bounce Bob off the pitch, then it was the perfect murder. Pity the conspiracy theories and allegations will swirl forever, just like when Cronje died.

Then there was that 11 year old kid who heroically took on a hog the size of a mammoth with a pea shooter. Call it the modern day David versus a porcine Goliath. Of course, the kid won. And duly posed for photographs. Incidentally, hogzilla is a technical term. Think of it as the Mozilla of pigs; slow, bloated, consumes a lot (of food or RAM, depending on where you want this analogy to go). Oops. Sorry, I picked the wrong browser to hate on.

Anyway, about that boy and his wild pig. Turns out it was all … (wait for it )

(you can practically hear the crackling)

hogwash.

Porky Pig is not amused. And would like his nice snug farmyard and his massive trough of slops to be brought over, toot sweet. Oink.

And to descend further into the murk, that dutch reality show where people had to compete for a kidney was also a hoax. Fortunately for the people competing (who really needed it, and not just for a pleasant accompaniment to steak in a pie either), the kidney was real. It was just that everyone participating in the show knew who’d get the kidney beforehand.

And this is different from every other reality show because … there was a kidney involved. Reality shows have as much to do with reality as professional wrestling has a resemblance to wrestling. Allegedly, of course.

Perhaps little noticed in the midst of all the other conflagrations but there is a war raging on in Estonia right now. Unlike your conventional conflict with the bombs, tanks, guns and allegations of human rights atrocities and genocide notwithstanding – this little tiff is being fought out online. Apparently one of the most wired nations in the EU (errm. that factoid isn’t backed up by numbers, but anyway), Estonian infrastructure has been under siege from massive, persistent and allegedly Russian sponsored denial of service attacks. The nation to nation equivalent of cramming an ATM card slot with chewing gum, if you like.

Some interesting background first – The Tribune notes that the denial of service attacks have stretched to almost 3 weeks now. It all started with the proposed movement of a WW2 memorial statue from downtown Tallinn to the outskirts of the city – seen by the pro-Russians as a slur on the war dead. Soon, rioting and protests on the streets (or so the story goes) spread into massive distributed denial of service attacks on Estonian websites.

Random aside here: remember the Daily Telegraph’s downtime last week? Also caused by a DDOS, although perhaps unrelated. DDOS has been a favoured tactic of extortionists and crackers everywhere – the TimesOnline article mentions at least one such case. It has long been suspected that other nations (China and North Korea, for example) provide state support for electronic espionage and other activities. But this latest attack on an entire country’s infrastructure is an interesting development – and a possible test case for how such activities will pan out in the future. There has been much made of NATO observers flying into Estonia (and rather meaningless expressions of solidarity) to well… observe how things are being handled but there isn’t much else that can be done.

The Economist picks up the story at this point and also makes an observation that friendly countries (.ee is part of NATO) have cooperated with Estonia in minimizing the effect of the packet flood. Swedish telecoms, for example, apparently cooperated in dropping packets destined for targets somewhere in Estonia. The fact is – it’s been several weeks, lots of Estonian sites have been hit and taken down and there doesn’t seem to be much let up. It’s also not particularly easy to stop a full scale distributed denial of service attack, even more so at the volumes of traffic that are being bandied about here – one article estimates 10,000 gigabytes of data. Yikes.

It’s a full scale war which seems to show no signs of abating any time soon yet it’s not being reported much. Perhaps (and rightly so) because there have been no casualties… It’s difficult to make pretty soundbites where there is no war footage, no IED blasts, no perceived casualties. Yet …

Last year a Department of Trade and Industry report found that more than 50 per cent of businesses had suffered “a premeditated and malicious” security incident in the past twelve months. For large businesses, the average cost of the worst such incident was as much as £130,000, the report said.

Yeah. It’s businesses, who cares etc etc. The Economist went a step further with the Estonia DDOS though (not sure if the full article is available online). There were quotes alleging that such large packets (hundreds of megabytes a pop, *goggle eyed*) could not have emanated from Russia without complicity from the telecoms in the country.

There are also parallels with other incidents – including this one. Should be interesting to see how long it will take before some regionwide agreement is made for these eventualities.

That’s two bad jokes (Fudd and Rarebit) combined to make a spectacularly terrible bunnyhop at humour.

Ah well. The weekend combined large amounts of flail with some small and depressing amounts of fail. The weather and general gloom isn’t helping much either. Also looking at my wordcount and how much I have left to explain (even to myself) about the work I’ve done over the past few years … I sometimes wonder if 2007 is a slightly overambitious submission year. There is brief amounts of cheer when I incorporate a fresh paper. Zoomclimbed my page/wordcount into the heady +10/+5000s but only to be replaced by more gloom as ruthless copy editing trimmed it down into a single digit page gain. Blah.

Oh. Obscure factoid. In 1950s Britain, pizza was referred to as Italian Welsh rarebit. A fact which caused me no end of amusement – combined with the lengthy (and possibly accurate) history behind the rarebit term.

And completely apropos, I made myself some rarebit this morning. With splashes of brown sauce and strips of bacon on the side. Yeah. I really need to do something about reforming my diet. I was setting myself a target of healthy eating for ages but that date has come and gone more than an year hence and I’m still eating like my arteries are plastic.

And now for something completely different. Pornography as social commentary. Was it ever anything else? I think not.

Yeah, this is one of those stream of consciousness type posts which is mostly random bits and pieces that are flitting through my head. When I go postal one of these days and start shooting the place up, these are the blog posts that a sensationalistic media will point to and say “yeah. he was nuttier than one of those fancy almond encrusted breakfast cereals. Why didn’t anyone see it sooner??!!”.

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I was watching late night TV yesterday and I saw the first part of Reader, I married him. On a vaguely bookish theme, this dealt with romfic or romantic fiction as a genre. I expected to nod off shortly into a few cutscene interviews with gushing women about how romfic changed their lives but it was a slightly more compelling documentary than I had anticipated, filled with interesting little factoids about the industry.

For example, I discovered that romfic accounts for 40% of all paperback sales? That’s a lot more than I imagined. There were also some theories that fewer men buy books written by women; that men are reluctant to buy books with the word Love in the title and most fascinating of all, reading romantic fiction can reduce stress levels by as much as 20%. Only the last was even quasi-experimentally established though, the first two observations sounded like anecdotes to me.

I rush to call out the apparent anecdotes because I’m currently in the middle of the intriguing Lymond Chronicles which are written by Dorothy Dunnet. I’ve also professed fandom in the past for Julian May – who turned out to be a female. I’m not sure which way that last example can be counted though; perhaps more women need to write with masculine sounding names to test out the hypothesis? Then again, perhaps it’s not wrong – the other half dozen or so books on my reading hopper right now are all by male authors.

There was also a lot of malarkey about romfic book covers being targetted to a specifically feminine audience; with horrifically anti-masculine cover colours of pink and lilac and lavender and … well, pale pastel shades. Some commentary was also devoted to how romfic was sneered upon by most people, despite its apparent popularity at the sales till. Actually, I’d probably call BS on sneering for elitism’s sake. Forget about the book covers. I come from a household where books are reasonably plentiful and as females outnumber the males; romfic is easily available. I’m slightly queasy at admitting it but in times of dire need (ie:, boredom and lack of anything else to read), I may have actually tried reading some of that tripe. It’s uh.. formulaic, predictable and sometimes vaguely funny, unintentionally so. If my (admittedly limited) sample size is anything to go by, I think most romantic fiction authors can be replaced by a moderately “intelligent” piece of computer software and a few hundred randomly generated key phrases, plotlines and sex scenes.

Onto something related, the idea of profiling… What you read can, in effect, be used to deduce things about you. The trivial romfic example is that someone is almost twice as likely to be female if they buy a bodice ripper from a bookstore. But this trivial form of statistical profiling can be extended in new and somewhat sinister ways too. Take, for example the NewScientist piece on new software from Microsoft being used to discover identities. And people are running around screaming like this is a new thing.

Actually, from experience in doing the same thing (more or less) a few years ago, I find that making educated sloppy guesses about gender and age and a particular income demographic is not hard at all, even with very limited resources. However, obtaining information with high precision is much much harder. Put another way, it’s easier to differentiate the the 21-50 year olds from everyone else than it is to differentiate the age bands 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Targetted online marketing has been around for the last decade or so but when I was writing software like this – the cost for the average marketing/promotional campaign did not even come close to the amounts required for really detailed demographic surveying. Perhaps now the techniques and the data volumes are finally available to people who can made it ubiquitous. Not an entirely comforting thought, especially if Microsoft and Google are going to try muscling into the territory.

Update: Interesting idea on thwarting monitoring and profiling systems starts here or later on in the same thread, winnowing and chaffing.

Well, that was a spectacularly unamusing week, right there. So much so that a fairly crappy Monday (as per usual) is looking positively rosy in comparison. Some of the Ach stuff has been brewing for a while, so I thought I’d externalize the accumulated angst once and for all by writing about it. Elliptically, of course.

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It’s been a strange strange week for any number of reasons – ranging from the utterly bizarre to the mildly WTF-ish moments. I could comment on the random asshattery that has been invading various parts of blog land but … ah, can’t be bothered.

So instead, I’ll jabber on about the bizarreness that was Eurovision. Let me explain how things work, for the uninformed. A bunch of countries get together, each nation (not just European nations, but Russia and Israel and a few other almost West Asian countries are included) puts forward a song for vote. Each nation can in turn pick 10 favourite songs (excluding their own, of course) after the performances; with a variable number of points being awarded by rank. When all the votes from all the nations have been tallied, the highest rated song … wins. Sounds simple and above board, does it not?

It isn’t.

(more Eurovision hate)

Yeah, I said I’d do one of these sometime or the other … so here we are.

(more lameass photoshopping)

So I was all out of my favourite mouthwash and the supermarket wasn’t stocking the same brand. So I had to settle for a bottle of suspiciously punk-rocker-hair blue coloured liquid instead. Yeah, it was the closest thing on the shelf, I just had a cursory look at the constituent chemicals and grabbed it. That’s my usual shopping methodology for non-essentials.

Anyhootenanny, I came back with the mouthwash – plonked it on the shelf … uh, I mean on top of the washing machine (because that’s where these things end up) and forgot about it. Till I had to use it. It tasted … sweet. Now that’s an unusual taste sensation for mouthwash so I had a closer look at the ingredients.

Sodium saccharin. Yeah, the bogeyman sweetener of my childhood – now packaged up in mouthwash.

When I was younger, there used to be this dodgy looking bloke outside the school gate selling luridly coloured popsicles. I can’t remember what they tasted like now, but it was the lurid colour that was the probable attraction more than anything else. Of course, my purchases of said luridly coloured ice blocks on a stick were always greeted with horror by my mom. The standard warning was that they contained saccharin instead of sugar (because saccharin is much cheaper, apparently) and sachcharin was bad and a nasty chemical.

A brief digression, my mom also used to warn me against excess intake of vinegar because it will melt your bones. Now I actually did listen to her when she gave dire warnings about saccharin but vinegar? I used to mash up fruit with chillie, sugar, salt and vinegar. There was no way I was stopping that, so I uh.. ignored the vinegar warning. Although she may have had a point there too… there used to be dodgy artificial acetic acid based vinegar floating around in the old days instead of the toddy stuff that is so freely available now.

But back to the saccharin. In recent years, it’s seen a mini-revival apparently – in the face of inconclusive evidence for its carcinogenic potential. Take, for example, aspirin. There was a time in the 80s when aspirin was the bogeyman of medicines. Now, of course – people use it as a prophylactic for everything from heart disease to bowel cancer. So it appears to be with saccharin. The earlier advisories and warnings seem to have been overturned… Saccharin is in.

Sorta. There is no definitive link between bladder cancer in rats and excessive dosages of saccharin, but I still wouldn’t make it my top choice in sweeteners. Then again, the inclusion of saccharin is probably only to make the mouthwash taste slightly more palatable – you’re not supposed to swig mouthwash like that horrific lucozade.

Hmmm. Wonder if saccharin (like alcohol) is absorbed by coming into contact with the tissues of the mouth and throat?

ManU, that’s who. Oh all right, I wanted the uber rich Abramovich to get his (in a perverse socialistic desire to level the playing field, possibly) and my desire has been sated. Of course, there is speculation that Roman may have lost interest in his blue clad toys and will sell off his interest. Just speculation, though. I’m probably not alone in agreeing that he got a good deal for his money. It was vaguely amusing to watch the Mancunians cheering on Arsenal too.

The season. Ah well. I’ve mentioned earlier that Reading are the team of the season for me. Berbatov was (probably) one of the better signings.

Arsenal? Forgettable. As Lee Dixon summed up last night, “we need a goal scorer, someone in midfield and someone at the back”. That’s like an entire team, then. The Henry dependence has been found out this season and I really don’t think the backline has recovered from the loss of both Sol Campbell and Cashley. Be that as it may, Julio might be heading back to Real Madrid and we’ll probably be getting Reyes back… An eventuality which fills me with some dread (even if our boy Baptista does seem a bit clumsy at times). Even more distressing is the slowing down of Jens… earlier he was crazy (in a staring eyes, foam-at-corners-of-mouth sort of way) but a great goalkeeper. Now he’s just uh.. crazy. He doesn’t even yell at the backline much any more.

Chelsea lost it because none of their signings really fired for them. Schevchenko? Fizzled. No, goals against non-league opposition don’t count. Yes, he’s displayed flashes of brilliance (that looked-like-a-cross-gone-wrong-but-ended-up-at-the-back-of-the-net goal, for instance) but not enough to justify the number of times he’s started. Ballack? spent a lot of time whining and stamping his foot petulantly at the referee, but not a whole lot more. Khalid the Cannibal? Bwahahahaha. He got eaten alive. The only one of the four signings that was worth the money was Kalou. By direct contrast, Henrik Larsson stepped on the field and owned all for Man U.

Actually. Why am I rabbitting on like this? Because (among other things), it’s patently obvious that predicting the winners of the premier league season isn’t an easy job, even for the experts at MotD. *grin*. The phrase “your guess is as good as mine” comes to mind. I don’t know enough about Euro football to critique this piece though – although complaints about the brutal, rugbyesque style English premier league football have been around for ages.

Just like Las Vegas. And I’m not referring to the 30 member strong “Sri Lanka Deserves another chance at the ICC Cricket world Cup!!”. It’s too late for groups like those, people outside FB are already making the same silly protestations.

So I was lurking around Facebook as I do on occasion and I noticed someone I knew. Rather than add the person directly, I was intending to ask her first but I forgot all about it. Yesterday, I met her husband. Yes, they’re both in the same university and the OH is in my department. Let’s call the hubby Simpson.

drac: “Hey, I didn’t see you on Facebook?!”
simpson: “What ees thees face book?”
drac: “Oh. Uh.” – how do you explain something like facebook? I still struggle with a definition… and hey, this is his wife after all, telling the bloke that his wife is on a “social” site may not go down too well.
drac: “It’s uh. a site where lots of university students hang out.” – ok. close enough, right?
simpson: “Oh. You mean like submitting CVs?”
drac: “Uh. Not quite. But I suppose you could do that.” – No, you’re thinking of that other abomination, LinkedIn.
simpson: “More informal then?”
drac: seizes opportunity. “Yes. Yes. Considerably more informal, but harmless” – dear god, I hope so. I have no idea.

simpson:” Oh. Er. No. I’m not on thees face book”
drac: Danger! Danger, Will Robinson. It’s time to GTFO of this unanticipated social conversational quicksand. “Oh, ok then. I thought you might be, since so many York students are in it already.” – hunts around for a quick subject change.
simpson:” Oh. Er. No. Is [wife] on it?” – *facepalm*. Shit.
drac: Jeebus dude. Why are you asking me? Ask HER. “I have no idea.” – liar liar pants on fyah. Although I can lie fairly convincingly when I need to.

simpson:” Because [wife] and I separated last week.”
drac: … ?!????
*audience draws a collective hushed breath.*
drac:“I’m so sorry to hear that.” – OMFG. I nearly put my foot in it. Way to go, drac ol boy.
simpson:in a matter of fact way – “Yeah. I moved out last week and we will get divorced soon I think.” – holy shit, weren’t you like married only like 6 months ago? and WHY are you telling me this? This is what I get for initiating casual chitchat. I need to STFU and ignore people more often. And oh. Series of hitherto unexplained observations suddenly make perfect sense.
drac:… – almost like a do go on, because I don’t know wtf to say, but accompanied by a sympathetic nod of the head. Jeebus dude, please do NOT start bawling. Ok? I don’t think I could handle that.
simpson: [launches into an explanation of marital breakdown symptoms to which I periodically go uh-huh and make other noises indicating sympathy and assent]

simpson:“So, why did you ask about face book?”
drac: “Umm. No reason, really. Just thought you might be on it or something and I couldn’t find you” – I am not dissembling here. That was the main reason for asking, was it not?
simpson:“Ah. oki. Should I join?”
drac: -take a deep breath, boyo. Not too emphatic, not too loud. Don’t reply too quickly. Pretend to think about it – faux casually, “No. It’s really not that interesting after the first week.”. -mind screams – Oh. Fuck No. Do not join. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200.
drac: – escape! escape! dude is going to figure something out. Offer help and ask him if he wants anything, to which he promises he’ll let me know… and then I flee before more awkward Facebook questions can be posed.

And I duly did. I did persuade the dude to go out to the pub this week though so I don’t feel like I’m totally abandoning him, now that he’s told me about his marital woes.

Next time I feel compelled to bring up Facebook in casual conversation, just have someone stab me in the arm, ok?

Obsessively passing through my mind. I made the upgrade to the new Office 2007 a while ago. The ribbon is the main (perhaps only) thing that immediately catches the eye in the upgrade. Now, while I was using Word – the ribbon wasn’t a big deal. I know all the keyboard shortcuts and I never need to take my hands off the keyboard.

Never having to take my hands off the keyboard – for example, to click on pretty buttons or menus – is a huge interface win for me. I’m much faster and more productive that way. But this is Word, a piece of software I’ve been using for a while now.

Because I like pretty graphs and I have a need for said pretty graphs, I had to use the new Excel and that’s where my problems started. Ma, I can’t find my old menus anymore. And since I maintain compatibility with older versions, I usually get an irritating dialog when I save telling me that there will be minor loss of fidelity. I uh… press save on average about three times a minute, a muscle memory holdover from the times when Office was crashy and power supplies were akin to a flickering light bulb.

So, I’m pondering a facelift for Office. This is it. I’ve officially become a User Interface conservationist. And get off my lawn, you damn kids.

Perhaps I should have stuck to Gnuplot or R, eh?

I watched the much anticipated Human Footprint on Channel 4 last night. Although watching TV might not sound like much of a sacrifice, I did give up the Catherine Tate Show and Roman’s Empire (and even Graham Norton!) so there was a nontrivial amount of interest there.

In summary, it was the average number of things we (and I get the impression that this meant Britons, since some of the statistics explicitly made mention of the demographic) do in our lifetimes. The average number of times people have sex (4000 odd, which seemed low. Even more so considering how marriage rates are plummetting). The average volume of tears shed in our lifetime (120 liters? Really?). The average number of words spoken in our lifetime (123 million? Hmm.) and so on.

All accompanied by some wonderful imagery – the number of apples we eat in our lifetime was illustrated by a gigantic apple made up of … apples. In a slightly more squeamish twist (not if you chuckle at toilet humour), the loo roll use and crap we emit illustration was as graphic. The number of times people have sex was illustrated by condoms hanging from a tree and so on. It was faux art, I suppose – but my inner Philistine can’t tell the difference anyway so I found it all rather cool.

One thought did occur to me though – and it’s a thought that I’ve been pondering (in a different context) for a couple of days. Everything was expressed as averages – presumably an estimated arithmetic mean. As interesting, although perhaps significantly more difficult to gather, I would have liked to see the median in there too.

There is a simple reason for this desire. It is in fact explained in the median link above – but I recently saw a more entertaining explanation which I intend to reproduce via paraphrase (can’t remember where I saw it though).

Imagine that Bill Gates walked into a bar full of penniless, jobless, hobos. Suddenly the average (arithmetic mean) earnings of every person in the bar jumps into the giddy millions – but this does not represent “a real number”. The median calculates the probability distribution instead – so the influx of one high number does not skew all the remaining low numbers in the distribution.

The arithmetic mean would have one believe that the earnings potential of everyone in the bar jumps into the millions when Bill Gates (an outlying anomaly) walks into bar. The median provides a more realistic picture. Knowing as much as I do about statistics, I would guesstimate (ha!) that calculating the median based on a small sample size is much harder though.

And in a brief and unrelated footnote, Twitter has an awesome easy-to-use API (I wrote a PHP messaging API for Ach in literally half an hour) – but no means of keeping contacts private. Jaiku has a horrible API in comparison, but they do offer privacy for contacts. In other words, neither of the two services provides me with exactly what I need for my next step in wurld dominayshun. Curses! The Loverlord is not happy.

Yes, grammarians, that missing apostrophe is intentional. Sue me. Don’t come here looking for good quality humour, I aim for ultra cheap and irritatingly frequent instead of occasional and classy.

Recently switched back to Pidgin (IM not confused with Gaim, honest) and I’ve discovered it’s not so bad after all. This is because my expectations are based on the not-updated-in-3-years-or-more Trillian, which makes me pretty easy to please. Randomly: use Gtk+ themes on Windows. They make Gaim look tons better. Almost not-ugly. I may have plugged the themes before, but it’s worth another reminder. The themes have made me almost-forget my cringing uglier-than-rhino-ass reaction to the Gaim UI…

Also had an almost-migration (yay for randomly and inappropriately hyphenating-words) from Twitter to Jaiku – only to discover that Jaiku doesn’t support IM notifications. A brief moment of panic – a reasonably well configured IM client, like an email client and newreader, can helps carve up the whole information overload into bite sized chunks. Fortunately, I discovered the intriguing Anothr – which promises to send RSS feeds as notifications to an IM client.

The whole idea is so simple that I wonder why people haven’t thought of it before – there is a cutesy syntax for adding, querying and removing feeds. In some ways, this reminds of an AIM bot I wrote ages ago (thanks to Net::AIM, I actually did very little of the actual code) for monitoring servers. Except this is for feeds, works on across multiple mediums and is probably less buggy than my concoction, but whatever.

I still like the Twitter API better though. But in the face of overwhelming peer pressure (or not), I have caved and become a jaikunaut. I mean, hey – facebook, last.fm, flickr, twitter, jaiku. How many accounts can one have before it all becomes too much? Oh, by the way – I need one of these too.

Shock discovery, Firefox can consume a lot of CPU, even when not doing very much. Mine was being a touch greedy and worse, the entire machine would judder to a halt at times for no apparent reason so enough was enough.

So, installed NoScript. And it all went away. The only major irritant is having to whitelist so many sites and allow them to execute JavaScript again but at least I have my machine back to normal. And Firefox even leaks less memory now which is a definite bonus.

And yes, more cricket… Bob Woolmer killed by snake venom? Honestly, these professional hitmen these days have no class. What happened to snipers from rooftops or a silenced pistol? It’s all taken a very regrettable and eastern mystic turn – perhaps an indication that nobody involved in the investigation has a clue. The words flashlight, ass, map, directions and both hands come to mind.

Then again, this story about the snake toxin was revealed by the Daily Mail. *curls lip in disdain*. There could be a story about aliens killing Woolmer tomorrow, for all we know. More interestingly, the Woolmer story has gotten less and less attention as the tournament progressed.

And er. not entirely out of place – SuicideFood. Vegetarians need not apply.

I may have mentioned this before but it’s worth a repeat – actually, no – nothing is worth a repeat but I can’t be bothered searching to see if I’ve said it before, so there. The peccavi pun. Punnery in a furrin langwidge. Those be the best sort.

But in other, mostly mundane news – I have caved and gotten myself a real (for certain values of reality) Facebook account. I’ve already discovered a slightly closer degree of separation to folk than I feel really comfortable with and the same basic problem with all social networking sites resurfaces. Umm, specifically – WTF does one actually do on Facebook? Ok, stalking random folk – I get that. Ogling pictures uploaded by people with a tenuous grasp of the concept privacy settings – I get that too. But thereafter? Um. Don’t geddit.

I’m trying out a new writing schedule which means I’m not online much. It also means that my score on Desktop TD keeps improving but my wordcount isn’t climbing as fast. Regrettable state of affairs, that. And thus – in lieu of real content (No one really wants to hear my ramblings on linguistics, do they?), a few links will have to do, I’m afraid.

GMail Greasemonkey scripts – compiled into one extension. Clearly, if you spend your time hanging about del.icio or digg or some place like that, you’re probably cursing me already for perpetuating this link. Awww. Anyway, some of the scripts are irritating, others less so. Can’t really say I use Gmail features enough to justify installation, but what the heck.

And in one of the most surreal pieces of lunacy yet, head for Australia and be settled in America instead. No, really. This is supposed to be a deterrent, apparently.

So I was watching Neneh and Andi last night (100 clove garlic chicken looked yum, by the way) and I heard a reference to “chicken fat pills” and their positive effect in uh… increasing the size of various parts of the butty. And I don’t mean chicken breast or the irrepressible chickenbutt either.

So, I set about uncovering the facts behind this chicken fat pill. Not err.. for myself, you understand. Manbewbs not being the most attractive of things and being positively hideous on someone of my skinny proportions. Purely out of scientific interests, yeah. And I discovered this link from well nigh 7 years ago.

Chicken fat pills. Ick. And you thought the cod liver oil capsule that your mother guilted you into taking (or was that just me? maybe) was bad.

And apropos of nothing, some Gootubey goodness.

And in other news, I have unearthed pictures of a Fools Gold Loaf. Damn, but that looks mighty foine. Deadly though. My arteries are constricting in sympathy even before the first bite is savoured… but still fine. And obviously enough, I look forward to making my own version – only with chillie paste and possibly sliced habanero peppers in place of the grape jelly.

And I couldn’t resist taking a dab at this.

So Charles Simonyi is in space. Old news, I know. It took me till today to realize that the person in orbit right now isn’t Charles Petzold. Somehow I managed to mix up the two based on the fact that they’re both connected with Microsoft and named Charles. Silly.

This is a pity because I was about to write fondly of the two editions of “Programming Windows” which are Petzold’s enduring legacy to programming and still occupy shelf space on my programming bookcase. Authoritative, dense and probably not for the faint of heart. None of the MFC junk in the earlier editions, it was all C. I haven’t programmed seriously for Windows since … oh, before Windows 2000 was released but they’re still useful for the occasional API reference. Long since superseded by other books on the shelf though.

But no, this isn’t Petzold in orbit. Wrong Charles. Instead, Simonyi the space tourist invented Hungarian notation. Charles Petzold (the other Charles) made it popular by using the notation extensively in his books.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve muttered that the guy who invented this piece of crap (meaning, Hungarian notation) had his head in the clouds. Now it seems that I was being prophetic. I was also wrong.

According to Joel Spolsky, Simonyi invented Apps Hungarian – a concept with which I agree and still use in other languages. Apps Hungarian notation uses mnemonics to indicate the semantics of a variable. That is to say, the intent. Systems Hungarian on the other hand, uses mnemonics to indicate the type. I hate Systems Hungarian with a passion. Guess which form of Hungarian notation is more prevalent in industry? Yeah. Not the good sort.

Charles, noooo! Get outta my head, Charles!.

There is a proposal underway for a Blogger Code of Conduct. No, really. Someone actually wants to do this. The phrasing in that code of conduct is camp enough to have come from a local blogging celeb or the astroturfing commune.

The highlowlights:
We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog: Responsibility for my own words on this blog? Fine. Responsibility for comments? Oh hell no. I may or may not endorse every comment on this blog (I’ve disagreed with a few people via comments on their blog and I’d extend someone the same courtesy here), but responsibility? No. Just no way. I have enough trouble being responsible for my own words and actions, never mind what someone else might choose to type in here.

There is a beautiful definition of unacceptable content there which annoys me more. For example, “knowingly false”. WTF? Blog authors need to become mind readers? Maybe we need a lie detector now.

And there is also the escape chute which says we reserve the right to change these standards at any time. Then why bother? I police (for want of a better word) my blog in my own way. Perhaps I already apply these standards. Why do I need a code of conduct and a badge in that case?

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Bangladesh do a number on the Saffers. Sorry, I shouldn’t be generalizing but the words one dimensional and bullies seem fairly accurate to describe the South Africans so I can’t say I’m altogether unhappy. Not entirely dissimilar to West Ham doing a number on Arsenal. Said it before, say it again – the Gunners play nice football and I will always be a fan but their ability to be sunk at the death by lower rated and lesser teams is … depressing and all too familiar. If it’s not Zamora, then it’s Marlon Harewood. If it’s not Harewood, it will be someone like Kevin Nolan or Anelka. Or Benni McCarthy. I could go on and name more names but this is getting worse than depressing.

Of as much importance, Pompey shocked Manyoo. You stupid Mancunian gits. This had better not cost you the title, by gawd.

Right. Sporting bile dispensed with. I’m not even sparing a thought for the Masters that I was watching this weekend because meh. Tiger lost.

The taboo quiz via Robhu.

I found it fascinating – sufficiently so to be its own post rather than a mere snippet. The incest question brought out my inner prude but I’m reasonably content with the depiction.

Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.29
Your Interference Factor is: 0.25
Your Universalising Factor is: 0.50

You know, this result highlights a disturbing trend. For once, I’d like to be something a bit more extreme than centrist. Apparently my views are utterly middle of the graph, both in politics and in morals. An unkind soul could even whisper “average” and I’d agree. I’d probably add “undecided” to that list.

I play a few games online. There is the notorious mind-crack that is Desktop TD and I also play on Battle.Net – the Blizzard Entertainment online servers.

I used to think that I’d grow out of this gaming business when I got older. I also thought I’d become more responsible, I’d have lots more money and that I’d know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. 0 out of 4. Well, not exactly 0, but fuzzy ideas and half formed plans do not a definite course of action promote. Oh and I also thought that I’d be more active (in a sporting sense) and inexplicably, that I might actually go back to wearing contact lenses or get lasik done. Nope, none of those have happened yet either. I also thought I’d be eating healthier food. Let’s not even go there.

So, clearly – this gaming business is here to stay for a while. In the old days, I could hop across to the US West or US East servers and be guaranteed a game. I play at weird hours anyway, so hopping to servers in earlier (or later) timezones is a surefire bet to get team mates who are relatively ok. And lest anyone think my standards are high, I mean team mates who are not drunk, not high on some other possibly illegal substance, not bored out of their minds and fewer “omg my mom is gonna kill me, I gotta go” incidents. And especially not team mates who are entertaining their girlfriends while attempting to play a computer game. Or even worse, their cat. Yes, all of those have happened.

With the advent of a nifty little program called WC3Banlist, there is more geographic location based discrimination on the servers nowadays. On a US server, but have an Euro IP? kicked. On a Euro server but have a Russian IP? kicked again. There is a sound principle behind this, of course – it’s unrealistic to expect some random Anzac dude to play well on an European server – but I happen to know that my connection is decent. Unfortunately, with the IP being what it is, I am embargoed in Europe, mostly. Which is ok. Europe isn’t the best server, but there are decent players.

But then, most of the games on European servers are hosted by people who don’t necessarily speak English. Umm. yeah. Problem.

Fortunately, Germans are common in the euro battle net server. Now, other languages I can’t handle – but the terse few phrases that are required to communicate with team mates in German? That, I can do. All except for one word. Occasionally, I’d have someone use the word nap as an adjective and I’d be all confused. Nap? He is nap? What does that mean? Obviously, rather than betray my n00bishness online (a no-no), I’d keep my trap shut and play anyway.

Today, I remembered the wonderful resource that is urban dictionary. Nap, defined. The third definition. Ooooh. Right. And here I was thinking that it stood for Notorious Ass Pirate. How embarassing.

So I wanted to burn an ISO image onto a CD today. My ancient notebook can do this – only I haven’t needed to do more than backup of random files for quite some time. It runs Windows. So I tried to figure out how to burn ISO images in Windows, without requiring expensive software or messing around trying to swipe some software.

Windows can burn CDs, but ISO images? Nope.

After a few helpful suggestions and lots of muttering, I found the ISO recorder power toy which allows precisely this task.

Burnt the images, did the backup job I wanted and now I was curious. Windows really can’t burn ISO images natively? That sounds strange. So I did a bit of investigating and downloaded a real CD burning thingamajig. The first thing it asked was – would you like to burn this image onto DVD media?

And that was how I discovered that the notebook actually posesses a DVD burner – not just a CD-R/RW burner as I had thought for err. almost two years. So, for two years I moaned about not being able to burn DVDs without plugging in an external drive and it turns out I had a burner on the notebook all this time? Of course it’s now pitifully slow and quite likely not of much use. *sigh*

If anyone wants me, I’ll be in that queue over there – waiting to hand in my geek card. kthxbai.

I think the botanical name is Capsicum frutescens but I could be mistaken on this. Google isn’t being very helpful.

Feel the burn, people.

Oh and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you’re well out of it.

Actually, no. It isn’t. But if it were, I’d totally want to be Bogart – and that’s not just because the cool surname either.

Is it wrong that I still snigger when I say “cowboy analogy”? Ok, it probably is but I blame psy. And since you’re asking – yes, the phrase “cowboy analogy” does occur frequently in my IM conversations. So what?

I watched White Men Can’t Jump on TV this weekend. Made notable (among many other things) by the fact that Woody has lots of of hair in that movie. One of the recurring themes in this ancient (but I suppose classic in its genre) movie is the idea that “A black man would rather miss than look bad”. Funny, I subscribe to that view myself. No, not about the black man but about looking good, even when you lose. Losing is ok, sometimes – so long as you don’t get kicked to the kerb and stomped upon.

As proof, I cite my continuing fandom for Arsenal football club (they look pretty passing the ball around, but can they win games? Umm. NO), the French rugby union team (when they’re good, they’re a really really great running team. Crazy, but pretty to watch) and most recently – the Sri Lankan cricket team.

Yeah, the 4 wickets in 4 balls business. Pretty? Sure. We didn’t get whipped like dogs, although we probably deserved it. On another day, I’d be well content with that.

Today? We still lost. Boo! Hiss!!

So the airbase took a hit or three. I’m not really up for analysis and what does this all mean and random handwringing. Or maybe I am. At any rate, from a fairly self centered point of view – this is going to suck for international travellers.

See, the airport was hit in 2001. That spooked lots of international airlines, just like Cathay Pacific this time around. They pulled out of Colombo. I’m sure there was some wheeling and dealing involved but they eventually started flying in again. In some cases, it took an year or more before the airline consented to operate the route. But there was a twist in the tale. Airlines used aircraft that were probably older than I am. Tattered and sometimes faded seatcovers, no personal video, seats with dimensions where stretching out is a luxury for even a runt like myself. And where the whiff of kerosene and avgas sometimes seeped into the cabin. In short, not the most pleasant flying experience.

And that’s probably going to start all over again. Gah.

And since I’m all about the airline tidbits today – I doubt that this airplane will be visiting the sunny isle any time soon. A double bed and champers? I’d totally fly that. Oh, I mean I’d sleep on the bed, of course. The best thing to do on long airline journeys. Watch movies that I couldn’t be bothered visiting the cinema or renting/buying the DVD for, play some inflight tetris (yes, I still do) and sleep. I’ll even forego the movies and tetris for a comfortable nap or three on a flight anywhere.

Completely unrelated sporting note: they recruited a manager with a crappy record at Middlesborough to coach the English football team. Now, sacking him for poor results will cost the FA £2.5 million. Failing to qualify for the Euro2008 tournament (don’t give me that jazz about having it all to do, we’ve only just started blah blah blah) will cost the FA one hundred meeellllioon pounds. I cleverly deduce that the FA stands to lose £102.5 million quid in a hurry if they don’t do something soon.

In more sport speculation, I wonder how many arms were twisted to clear the Pakistani squad in the Woolmer case. An extremely defensive trio of Pakistanis were interviewed on Newsnight last night too. Ok, so the guy interviewing them was an idiot (leading questions were his speciality) but nobody came out of that room smelling of roses.

So I wrote about some of the online games that I play when I’m bored. Yesterday, I discovered Desktop TD. Oh my. I’ve become so obsessed with tower defense maps that I’ve even downloaded the original War3 bonus maps to play them.

And in something completely different, I swear if I see that line about “Sinking one billion hopes” one more time – I’m going to … I don’t know what I’d do, actually but it wouldn’t be pleasant. I’m more interested in the Agatha Christie-like potential of the Woolmer murder saga. Had a brief disagreement about the more appropriate AC hero/heroine summoned to investigate… I go for Hercule Poirot, Rustifer wanted Miss Marple. Don’t forget that Poirot would probably be ignorant of cricket and that has comedic potential.

“Cricket?! What eees that game?”. Also, where the heck is Horatio Caine when the Jamaicans need him, huh?

Last weekend, the local supermarket was having an offer on pâté and it was being offered at a cheap cheap price. Well, cheaper than I expected, at any rate. Unsurprisingly, I made a grab for it. The ethics of eating a food product made from forcefed geese never really crossed my mind… I wanted to try it again and it was cheap enough to throw away if I really hated the stuff.

It was only on reaching home that I realized my mistake – it wasn’t pure gooseliver but mixed with (the heresy!) pork. That explained the low low price. *sigh*. It still tasted mighty fine though.

And another theme, comfort food. Same supermarket stocked smoked bockwurst. Now if only they had used bockwurst in this recipe… That would have been heartstoppingly fantastic.

And in a final foodie theme, spaghetti bolognaise is the favourite British home cooked dish. OMGWTF?! Why? And there are only four dishes made by the average Brit? Why not just eat pot noodles and forget about the rest then…

Somewhere around this time last year, I was posed with a problem. A bit of (personal) history here – I was doing some crucial (to my thesis, anyway) research and I was busy running experiments and writing papers and the like. By this time last year, I had finished those experiments, my results were decent and I had decided to myself that a break was required. So I was looking around for something to do.

When looking around for something to keep idle hands occupied, I usually tend to scratch my itches – so to speak. I write things that I need. Sometimes this includes writing plugins to spam fighting software, sometimes it involves various other things. But this time, I got this idea about doing an aggregator right. So, it was around this time last year that I decided to build Achcharu. Yeah, Ach is a one year old.

Yeah, so there’s ancient history here, here and here. I really didn’t write much about Ach back in the day but I’ve begun to realize the value of documenting some of my plans and assumptions because … as usually happens … I tend to forget them fairly fast. I blame my advancing years.

Read the rest of this entry »

The odds on a subcontinental team winning the Cricket World Cup got a bit shorter, didn’t they? Oh my. I wish I cared more, honestly I do but there were other, more compelling sporting activities happening yesterday.

Ireland were pipped by France to the six nations title. To be honest, I thought the ref for the France/Scotland game (south african?) was pretty fricking awful. He farcically sinbinned the wrong Scottish player for a late tackle and the way he posed the question about the final injury time try made it very difficult for the TV ref to overturn it. Also, the guy scoring the injury time try for France was named Elvis. Remember the name, people. Elvis. Then again, the Irish also had a few forward passes in their tries against the Italians, so it’s all fair. Maybe. Ireland then made up for the lack of St. Patrick’s sporting cheer by mugging Pakistan in cricket. I’m sure the majority in the green isle won’t give a damn about the cricket but meh. Small consolation.

Everytime I write off the French rugby union team, they either sink further into the cesspool of imbecilic play or they turn shit around and kick the stuffing out of their opponents. I’m going to give up trying to predict what they’ll do next. Just like Arsenal in the Premier League, truth be told.

A heretic mails to inform me that his pick for the Cricket WC semifinalists are SL, WI, Aus and SA. He forgot NZ, the follower of the false prophet. He also forgot Bangladesh and Ireland.

Easter is almost upon us. Ok, so I’m not really religious so it doesn’t matter – but there is a certain savour to having the pesky undergrads away from the department for a few weeks. No doubt they’re saying the same thing about their long suffering demonstrators.

Someone (on IRC yesterday?) remarked that Easter is actually a fairly strange holiday. I don’t mean in a religious sense since I have absolutely no context to decide strange and non-strange but more an observation about some of the rituals and symbology of the season. There are eggs usually of the chocolate persuasion. There are also rabbits. Or hares. Or bunnies. Fertility symbols apparently. Which then begs the question why people don’t throw eggs more often. Forget the rice throwing rituals at weddings, just break out a dozen eggs and let fly.

Speaking of throwing eggs, apparently Brits throw away a third of their food. But all of these are apertifs before the main course…

I Used To Believe is like Grouphug or postsecret yet not quite as disturbing just yet. Or maybe it is …

I always thought that the easter bunny had special chocolate flavoured poo, and thats how he made the easter eggs.

(source)

and you ate the eggs, kid?

Why do some things seem so incongruous and strange on second thought? Or even the first glance.

There is at least one person I know who apparently does not like mayo on their pineapple. By the way, that phrase is responsible for helpless laughter and much innuendo in certain IM circles. To the food related version of that observation, I’d say: “you follower of a false eating standard, the mayo is irrelevant. It’s the pineapple that counts“. Still, someone finds that combination strange. I find it perfectly normal myself.

There is a whole website devoted to keeping people updated about your exact whereabouts. Twitter. You can even microblog on it or just answer the question… It’s all good. There are more startups devoted to online calendars and organizing parts and portions of my life than I have fingers on both hands. I also have a PDA, a choice of organizational software and I suppose even my cheapass hand-me-down phone can double up as a personal organizer of sorts if I wanted. But … I don’t use any of them. More useless accounts?

Is it wrong that my favourite enhancement from the shiny new Microsoft Office 2007 install is a set of new bundled fonts? In particular, Consolas. A specialized editor that I use does not like proportional fonts and I hated the other options I had available.

And yes, the choice of font matters.

But the prime piece of weirdness stems from an observation yesterday. A Spanish goth. Now, this may require a bit of explanation – but the general idea with goths is that they steer clear of sunlight and are generally pasty faced. How exactly does one accomplish this when one hails from Spain? Or even the tropics? I think there needs to be some extra credit for trying to vampirically keep out the tanning effects of the sun when you’re from a sunny country.

Sometimes work can become tedious, monotonous and downright boring. Sometimes it can get even worse. The sure-fire remedy for work related boredom is to drop into a quick shoot-em-up game, mindlessly frag everyone and everything in sight and then come back to work – dripping virtual blood, gore and bits of exploded space craft. I even had understanding employers who allowed this during work hours. It was not uncommon for me to stop coding, zap a few zombies and then come back to work refreshed. I presume employers operated on the basis that it’s better to let a game-happy employee occasionally kill zombies rather than stare at a piece of code too long and become one.

For a while, I used to employ conventional shoot-em-up classics for this purpose – Quake, ROTT among others. Then, games become progressively more demanding in their hardware requirements and the effort involved in closing editor windows and stuff to play a game became … too tedious. So, lightweight alternatives were urgently required.

Actually, I had a manic Tetris stage during my undergrad project too. But that’s an abherration. It’s not a real shoot-em-up and it’s far too addictive.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been playing a cutesey little flash game called AlphaForce. It doesn’t have fancy graphics or chilling sound effects but you do get unlimited ammo and progressively harder opponents. There are even cutesy powerups that allow for a bit of strategy. When in a rebellious or just plain destructive mood, I just load up the game and blow shit up.

And then recently I discovered another – Hoverbot Arena. Slightly better graphics, better sound, slightly worse gameplay but still – very satisfying explosions.

And now you know where all that pent up aggression goes.

Never realized how popular the medium of ceefax (teletext?) was in the UK till I came here. It’s 33 years since the ceefax service launched and I use it for lots of things. In fact, I usually hit the ceefax page for most sports scores.

So about the Cricket World Cup.

The cricket ceefax pages have a number of entries on the world cup, including their seedings for the 16 teams participating and a set of pages which talk up a master blaster and bowling/all round ace for each team. The seedings first. Guess who’s top? Australia. Yeah. The allegedly very beatable team are still seeded Numero Uno and ceefax thinks they’ll get their third successive world cup victory this time around. In a move that dismays fans everywhere, the second seeded team is Sri Lanka. Yeah, there’s more but blah blah blah, whatever.

Two factors make me wonder if this is really justified. Then again, the ceefax pages haven’t been notorious for calling it correctly (unfair though, along with most of the planet – they didn’t call the England Ashes victory in 2005 nor the Aussie drubbing delivered in 2006). First, the SL team isn’t exactly a bunch of spring chickens and secondly, notorious slow starters or otherwise, they lost to NZ in the warm up match. SL’s Ceefax master blaster, Sanath J. was rested for the match and their spin ace Muralitharan got carted around the pitch for 60+ runs in his 10 overs. Hardly inspiring news for a team seeded to see Australia in the final, eh? Shades of ‘99, anybody? Just me then? All right.

Oh and the Six Nations stuff today is boring but tomorrow – England vs France. Woo. And Yaschvilli is probably playing.

Ever wondered how confusing names are? Take programmes on TV, for example. Yesterday, I was trying to explain to chickenbutt that I had an evening of glazing over in front of the idiot box ahead of me. With roasted, salted peanuts to munch on. Fine. Fair enough, I go through periods of TV hate where I don’t bother watching anything and I also go through periods of being glued in front of the TV. This is clearly one of the latter times.

So what was I watching? Dragons Den – nothing to do with dragons or mythology of any sort. Where every single one of the five “investors” are a Simon Cowell with a nipple tweaked (ok, that wasn’t a pleasant mental image for some of us. I’m sorry). The series is beginning to get a bit predictable too. Never come in and expect to give away a 5% stake of your whizz bang company, they’re going to turn around and ask for 50%. Oh, the dragons might occasionally be “generous” (with the reggae sauce guy a few weeks ago) and make it 40% because he needs to make a living.

Then there was the entertaining Party Animals – which really isn’t about much partying in the conventional sense. If I am to go all SepiaMutiny about the casting for the series, I’d note that there is a female Asian character, played by Shelley Conn. Still, it’s entertaining stuff.

And finally, there is the not so desperate and definitely not housewifey Desperate Housewives. Yes, I watch it. To quote someone else, don’t judge me. I’d maintain I watch it for the luscious Eva Longoria and that’s mostly true but recent photographs are making me rethink my position. Somewhat meh but still worth an ogle or four.

And for something completely different, the new Ach theme is somewhat whimsically called Metal Mickey. Inspired by the Suede song that I happened to be listening to fairly frequently and ultimately by the quirky BBC comedy Metal Mickey. Is there a connection? Well, I think the greys, blues and blacks look vaguely like Metal Mickey’s colours.

Boogie, boogie, boogie! Yeah. or summat like that.

So there’s a famous AI researcher giving a talk today and I’m skiving off. Unshamedly? Yeah. When I was an undergrad, I used to skive off lectures too. Mostly because there was something more interesting (Quake or Starcraft) to do. Some others because I felt they were pointless. In this postgraduate world things are strangely different and somehow quite similar. My laziness and apathy to bestir myself, if anything, has multiplied over the years.

Now that I’ve typed in a few lines, I’ve somehow magically justified the skiving too. I know the line between arrogance and pragmatism can be a thin one; but if I know the talk is going to be uninteresting and I’m more likely to be clock watching than not, it just seems practical to not go. Is it polite though? Probably not. So my self interest in avoiding potential boredom is yet another example of a social trap.

I’m still not going to the talk.

Dev blog announcement. Essentially, someone got into the Wordpress install hosted on the servers and made some modifications to a couple of files. Malicious changes at that. The information in the blog post seems to indicate that feed.php and theme.php (both in wp-includes) were modified. Perhaps other files were as well. The changes seem to have been made fairly recently (3-4 days ago?) but best not to take any chances.

So umm. Please go download the latest release (2.1.2) if you are running 2.1.1 – don’t mess around waiting with this one, just go do it now. Upgrade, make sure all the files are overwritten by the latest release.

I also took the liberty of mailing a few people who are running potentially exploitable versions of Wordpress – drop me a reply if you need a hand upgrading or need a few custom access rules to prevent malicious access in the meantime.

And yeah, stuff like this can happen from time to time. It can happen to anyone and to any project. I’m not particularly happy with how long it took before the malicious mod was discovered but better late than never applies, I suppose. Oh and a few hours of combing through logs for a couple of blogs await – I need to see if some nasty cracker exploited the wide open installs on this domain before I had a chance to make the upgrade. Le sigh.

The York diocese has granted permission to exhume a Yorkshire aristocrat in the hope of finding clues about bird flu. This unfortunate diplomat died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919 and was buried in a lead lined coffin. The virus that killed him may have been preserved.

This or a scenario close to it has been the subject of only a few dozen blockbuster movies. The hapless researchers doing the digging up are among the first to die (unless they happen to be reasonably good looking females).

But back in the real world, this step does raise a few interesting questions – for example, if more people jump on the cryonics bandwagon – they could conceivably be thawed out in future to allow scientists to study viruses and other nasties that were frozen with them.

And interesting enough to not just be a snippet, 10 modern delusions. I would say Amen for 2, 8, 9 and 10 in particular but then I’d be contradicting delusion number 6 – Astrology and similar delusions are “harmless fun”. I also wish more people (especially those calling themselves economists online) understood delusion number 5 (Laissez-faire capitalism is the prerequisite for trade and prosperity) too. And also, I’m shocked, absolutely shocked that the Guardian saw fit to run a piece praising Thatcherite era policies.

And seen in an obscure IRC channel last night: various ogles and cringing over pictures, new names for glamour couples, yet more discoveries about Colombo (and miniscule degrees of separation with entirely the wrong sorts of people), lecherous thoughts over jailbait and other idle chatter.

(IRC chat excerpts ahoy)

I’ve alluded several times before to how large a job can feel when it’s viewed from the outside. I tend to do this a lot. So, this weekend – I stayed at home (a flu break of sorts). That provided enough impetus for a bit of housecleaning.

I finally stopped sitting on sundry papers submitted and pieces of research scribbled and half-done over the years; started on the great merge of 2007. Essentially putting everything into some sort of cohesion and texifying the stuff that I had written in Word and other weird formats ages ago. Because if I don’t fricking submit by summer, I’m going to be missing out.

The theory is that there are many many different forms of writing. The dribble on this blog notwithstanding, I flatter myself that I am a reasonably coherent academic writer. I suck at the informal stuff and even the formal writer-writer stuff. But I can generally put down my reasoning on a page of text – which is basically what academic writing requires. Unfortunately, my style appears to have evolved (a kind word, that) and things I wrote (and were even accepted) ages ago seem horribly contorted and awful now.

Must.resist.temptation.to.rewrite.reams.of.old.material. Just not worth it. But even with that said, it’s going to be sad to have to ruthlessly trim down my 100+ page count at present into a more realistic and much much smaller number. Boo.

Yeah and random bugs with my chosen Tex environment are annoying too. There is too much voodoo in a standard MikTex environment for my comfort. I also made the (possibly fatal) error of upgrading from my venerable (and working!) 2.4 to the not-so-new 2.5. Forgetting the old adage of “If it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it” and promptly breaking everything. Gah.

Oh and over the weekend, Chelsea won the match, but Arsenal threw the better punches. Encouraging from Arsenal, but not enough. Also, they weren’t in Fight Club but apparently a few of their team forgot that. Now if only the Carling cup were being awarded for being a better team of amateur pugilists, Arsenal would have been all over it like a liquored up dirty flyweight over the canvas. As it was – two red cards. And to conclude on a footy note, amazing how much better the Chelsea back four look when Terry is there. Diaby clearly failed at the kick to the head ploy.

And I updated this post to remind myself (it was only Saturday! It seems so long ago!!) that Italy sliced and diced the Scots in the Six Nations and the French grandslam hopes are still alive. Barely. They have a couple of tough games to go, though.

Much (perhaps overly so) has been made of comment moderation, flaming and other aspects of administering online fora recently. Obviously, this is a great time for me to weigh in and reduce the signal to noise ratio even further.

See, I deal with more than just weird comments on my own site, I also need to play guardian of truth and light (such as it is) for other people’s entries via Ach. With varying results.

Some stats first. Since the last time, there has been a bit of an explosion in tagging.

(cold hard numbers and other stuff)

Has my fifteen minutes started? Already? I’m not prepared! Stop the clocks!!

I was checking my mail (not e-mail, but the paper, envelope, Royal Mail variety) this morning and I discovered a thick letter sent from somewhere in the States in my pigeon hole. Now, mail from America isn’t exactly the novelty that it used to be at one point – but this letter was sufficiently thick and from an unknown address that my curiosity was aroused. Joisey? I don’t know of any one in Joisey.

With a bit of trepidation, I opened up the letter and was greeted with several sheets of official forms and a cover letter on an expensive double sheet of paper.

Dear [Senhor Drac],
Congratulations!
It is my great pleasure to inform you that you have been chosen as a candidate for inclusion in the upcoming 10th Anniversary Edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering®

As it happens, I was simultaneously attempting to play Literati with Chickenbutt and eat a few sammiches. And err.. trying to read this mysterious letter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my next bite of delicious roast ham sammich went the wrong way as I choked.

[13:46] drac: I got this letter from somewhere in the US asking for bio data? WTF?
[13:46] chickenbutt: huh?
[13:46] chickenbutt: who sent it?
[13:46] chickenbutt: is it a company or some silly idiot
[13:47] drac: AHAHAHAHAHAHA
[13:47] drac: OMGWTF
[13:47] drac: OMG OMG OMFG (restrained and unfazed as always, that’s me)
[13:47] chickenbutt: what?
[13:48] chickenbutt: tell!!!

Completely unlike the TARDIS, for example.

Any problem or knotty little puzzle abandoned assumes monstrous proportions when I return to it after a few weeks. Consider that for the past 10 days or so, I’ve been wrestling with FrameNet, a very nifty but rather complex lexical resource. It’s important for any number of reasons that I complete this technical arm wrestle and making this glorified dictionary work for me – not the least being that I’m supposed to be in writeup mode now and I still have lots of loose ends to tie up.

Unfortunately, the Framenet stuff is inter-related with some other work that I did almost an year ago. Around March last year, I took an unofficial sabbatical of sorts from this whole research gig and did a bit of commercial work for ye olde filthy lucre. It worked out quite well, on the whole – but all of the experiments I carefully crafted last year look like Klingon crossed with Mumbo-Jumbo at this point.

Most emphatically not of the good, since it’s understood that the person who discovered some novel process is generally supposed to be capable of explaining it. I can’t for the life of me remember the details of my (supposedly) novel process any more, let alone explain it.

This whole “out of sight, out of mind makes problems grow larger” theory has another anecdote. I somewhat foolhardily undertook an ambitious job for Habari – the whole dbdelta business. I had it covered, almost – till I had to take a hasty rain check and dive into the FrameNet stuff. Now that stuff looks indecipherable too. Ugh.

And a final sporting note – I tuned in late to watch Bolton vs Arsenal last night. Adebayor had already scored the first goal. Watched the game inbetween channel surfing and then settled down to watch it to a finish just before Adebayor blew a chance at an open goal by hitting the side post. A couple of minutes later, Bolton scored an equalizer.

What did I do? What any true fan would do, of course. Clearly, Arsenal had been doing great without my viewership and I was jinxing them. So I promptly changed the channel and pretended the match didn’t exist.

It worked too. Although I only found out about it in the news later on that night.

My landlord is quite enthusiastic about embracing technology. On the face of it, he’s completely atypical of your everyday geek – but those dusty jeans and Harley Davidson leather jackets actually disguise someone who is pretty technically adept, but very self deprecating about his undoubted abilities.

Recently, he got himself one of those fancy new fangled iPods.

Only, the iPod is notoriously finicky about the formats of video that it will play – so he needed to sit down and do a conversion job from his existing archives. He asked me what I would use and I had no hesitation in pointing out VLC. Free, plays practically anything and the transcode wizard will convert into different formats as well. Unfortunately, VLC isn’t pretty. Yeah, it does the job but he didn’t like it. So he actually went shopping and bought two pieces of software (not one, two) that he liked. Why did he buy it? Because “I just liked the look of it and I knew I’d enjoy working with that software“. Aside, it was Xilisoft Video Convertor and DVD Ripper.

Anecdotal, perhaps – but yet another reminder of how much looks actually matter. Functionality means very little – and people are actually prepared to pay money even when free alternatives exist. Granted, the prices were low enough that it counted about as much as getting dinner delivered from the nearest indian takeout but even so …

It seems like England won. Will it make up for the mauling they suffered in the Ashes? Maybe not. It’s still nice to see that the frantic (and necessary) tinkering has paid off somewhat. Who’da thunk that Plunkett would become a potent strike bowler? I certainly didn’t see that one coming.

And in more pick-me-up news, it seems that Viagra will be available over the counter. From Valentine’s Day. If the symbolism escaped anyone, please do go to your local A&E and have that nasty pointy stick poking out of your eye attended to. And via the same source, I see that Glaswegian smokers got a head start. That must have made for some awkward consultations in Scotland, eh? “It’s been great, doctor. I’ve had just as many fags and lots more wood after the treatment. Isn’t that marvellous?” [I'm channelling Frankie Boyle here]

And I’m highly taken with UsedToBeCool – only slightly less weird than one of my longtime favourites, Aphex Twin. I discovered UsedToBeCool via Lady Luck – and I somewhat shamefacedly confess that this was completely contrary to my preconceived notions and thus an extremely unlikely (or so I thought) source of decent DnB. Not one of those bandwagon humping indie chicks? Awesome. Now to see if UTBC’s second album will be as good as their first.

or not.

It’s not often that people living in Yorkshire can gloat about good weather but today is one of those days. While the southern half of the country closes schools and advises people to stay indoors; York is enjoying a pleasantly balmy (ok, not really) -2c low. And no snow. Plenty of ice on the roads though, which sucks.

And I gave up watching last night shortly before Spain scored the only goal of the game against England. Yeah, injuries and missing players but whatever. And interestingly, MacLaren got booed by the crowd when the game finished. Again. How many matches has he been in charge now? 5? Not having much of a honeymoon period as a manager, is he?

And some compelling TV – a video doing the rounds recently – American A-10s versus UK Scimitars in a friendly fire incident. The subtitled text pretty much says it all. War is hell.

I have no idea why, but people (usually undergrads) occasionally ask me for project advice. Specifically, what do I think they should do for their final year project and so on. Like so many things in life, that’s pretty much a no-win situation. I find it insanely difficult to propose a project idea that doesn’t suck on some level to the person who is going to do the project.

So I cop out tamely and always end up asking them a counter question: “Well, what do you like to do?“. Inevitably, there is a lot of hemming and hawing or an immediate response of “I like pretty much anything, just give me a project idea“. Occasionally accompanied by a “OMG deadline tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if it sucks: if I don’t give in a proposal, I fail“.

Someone (was it you, Ed?) proposed that you should do stuff for your project that you like, but don’t absolutely love. You need to be able to like the project topic enough to stick with it when the inevitable teething problems occur. At the same time, perhaps you shouldn’t do stuff that you passionately love. Not so sure about this, but the line of reasoning is that you will end up hating the drudgery of a project and that means you will like what you’re doing a little bit less. Why get to the point where you’d treat a former favourite subject area like a dirty shirt? No reason at all.

(and it gets really tricky now)

So all in all, it’s shaping up to be a decent weekend. Went to the Derry last night after what seemed like ages (about an year, actually). The Derry or Deramore Arms is really the old man’s pub in the village. At least it has that (somewhat justified) reputation. Oh, there were few grumpy old men but there were also lots of kids who didn’t look much more than uh … 16 at the most. No, they were probably older, I’m a bit rubbish at guessing ages.

And they had pheasant on the menu! I wonder if Lord Deramore’s fabled hunting grounds contributed to the day’s special.

Today, England kick off their Six Nations campaign as do Les Bleus. Tomorrow, it’s the Super Bowl in Miami and probably the best fixture of the Six Nations opening weekend (Ireland vs Wales). I have laid on a stock of vittles and potables and intend to spend the rest of the weekend in cow mode – munching on crisps and peanuts while watching the TV with glazed eyes.

And I played Wii sports for like the first time ever and we wants that console, my precioussss. Yes, we does. The Wii belongs to my supervisor, who is a bit of a gadget freak. In what seems like the intro to a bad bad joke; a Chilean, Nepali, Greek and Sri Lankan went to a house close upon midnight last night to shut themselves up in a room and wave around a piece of plastic frantically while watching a TV. Yes, there was beer involved (and oh my, the Derry stocks excellent scrumpy. Win!) but I don’t think it was a factor.

To be brutally honest, I think I really want the console because I play better snooker, tennis and golf than I ever would in real life. There are also a few comedy shots of my supervisor playing the boxing game; which involves two controllers being waved around frantically in the air in a simulation of landing punches on the opponent.

I uh… only need the university to overpay me once again (and obviously, tell me to keep the excess cash) and I should be able to afford a Wii easily. Somehow I’m not really hopeful about that happening, but hey.

This is related to a question I was asked earlier – am I the sole author of the (snarky and sometimes hilarious) tags on Achcharu? If that’s all you wanted to know, then the answer is no. But since I’m not content with a simple answer, a bit of history is necessary. Actually, no. The history lesson isn’t necessary but I’ve been busy in the real world and a series of digressions will serve as content for today.

When I started on Achcharu, I just needed three things from it. Those goals are essentially unchanged today so it’s worth repeating.

1. I wanted to have blog entries presented in a manner conducive to quick scanning
2. I wanted to have some collaborative input on the stories and some commentary.
3. I wanted meta-aggregation (more on this later)

(but wait! there’s more)

A few weeks ago, there was a huge buzz around a new blogging software project named Habari. I heard of it then and wandered over to the IRC channel to take a look at the product. The people behind the project were already known to me through other IRC channels and I was quite keen to find out what they had been cooking up.

Other people have already done the introductions and the guiding principles behind Habari. They’ve also partly addressed the FAQ aspect; particularly a generic answer to why we need yet another blogging application in a market that is already rather crowded. Wordpress works, doesn’t it? Why do we need to bother reinventing the blog software wheel?

I run Wordpress on the Lair, as I have done for the last couple of years. It’s not everything I want it to be – but realistically, I don’t know if any blogging application could be that without a lot of custom additions. I’ve also been following Wordpress development (and development of some of the plugins) for a while and I’ve occasionally given back fixes, albeit minor ones. But there’s no reason why blogging software development couldn’t be done differently; or dare I say it, better.

I think it’s more interesting for me to explain why I personally decided to contribute to Habari development.

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Like most practicing software engineers today; I’ve worked with version control before. Only, I’ve been involved in commercial projects with lots of rules (mandated automatic checkouts, lots of JUnit tests run before and after changes) and a fair degree of stricture.

Today, I uh … checked in a piece of code to a public open source project. As per my luck, this piece of code promptly barfed and left a messy stain on the keyboard and carpet. Not to mention more than a little egg on my face.

Can you imagine the stress that people face when there is a deadline looming and they’re scrambling to finish something? Trust me, it’s nothing compared to the feeling of utter panic that sets in whch you realize that you’ve ummm.. broken the build for potentially hundreds of people and you’d better fix it. toot sweet. And the tooter, the sweeter.

Some faffing around and ineffectual flailing later, I actually backed out the broken changes, tested, checked out to make sure there were no subsequent revisions, tested again and committed. Order was restored. Apparently, this process took 40 minutes. It seemed like much less at the time. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen before a few bleeding edge SVN updating hawks had noticed the breakage. Gah. BURRRRRN.

According to the Pragmatic Programmers, breaking the nightly build gets the luckless developer an award of a dunce cap. I think I’ll hunt around for some headgear for the rest of the day.

Last year, he choked. This year, Peyton Manning finally broke the family jinx, gave away his ticket to watch the game from the stands and will have a chance to play.

Will he choke? I rather hope not. Yes, that was the NFL, folks. Superbowl in a couple of weeks and I’ve been watching the playoffs as usual.

In other news, I am not buying the Arsenal is a young team, full of promise business… but I’m definitely not the only person amused by Chelsea’s spectacular implosion. So, I’m probably one of those masochists who are less interested in a team that’s winning easily (as Chelsea were for the past few years) and more interested in a team that wins under pressure or in times of strife. Most other teams in the league have that quality. Chelsea have never really been challenged, have they? About time it started for them.

Pick of the league so far this year? Reading. It could all go horribly wrong for them yet but they’ve gotten some scary results. Now if only they don’t do a Wigan or Charlton next season.

The gods of Winter have finally decided to make an appearance around here. Not particularly nice to be greeted by a faceful of icy sleet as you step out of the house but at least it fits the most miserable day of the year tag.

My bi-annual visit to town yesterday was made more eventful because the Ouse was being stroppy. Gawked at the floodwaters for no apparent reason (once you’ve seen one flood someplace, you’ve pretty much seen them all); gave my best Yorkshire accent impersonation to random tourists who wanted to know the name of the river and wandered around town.

I was in town to perform the last rites yesterday on a consult/contract job I was doing for most of last year. Not really sure about how to sum up the experience actually. My expectations of employers in the software industry are so laden with cynicism that it takes a fair bit to surprise and astonish. This gig actually did surprise me (in a good way) but unfortunately, the parts that didn’t surprise – or perhaps more appropriately, met my preconceived expectations – ultimately did the deal in. It was, in my personal nomenclature to describe jobs, a grey experience. A lighter shade of grey with the paler positives predominant over the darker negatives, to be sure. It was also an excellent learning experience at the higher end of the curve; the sort of stuff that doesn’t involve writing a single line of code.

And I also have a stock of war stories to rival the best (or worst) that Scott Adams can think up.

Selectivity in recollections is a strange thing, really. Sometimes the good stuff sticks, sometimes the bad stuff does. Years after the fact, it’s no longer possible to even remember the specific incidents or events that led upto the conclusion that something was good or bad – but the conclusion does hang around a lot longer.

No, really. I don’t. Someone said in IRC last night: “I don’t have time to type these words to you now”. Except he was in the channel and typing them out anyway.

Life in drac land has been littered with an assorted series of road blocks recently. First, I made the traumatic decision to turn off Tab Mix Plus this morning. I say this with all the pathos of someone forced to switch off a life support machine. I think I’m justified because my browser essentially is my life support. I spend an embarassing amount of time in front of a LCD screen these days (as I have done for years now) and a good proportion of said time is spent staring at a browser. How my browser is behaving at any point in time matters for this reason.

It’s not really a secret that Firefox can be problematic at times. My biggest bugbear in the pre 2.0 days was the ghastly memory leaks. Spend a few days using the same Firefox instance and the memory usage jumps to obscene proportions. I thought I had it narrowed down to Greasemonkey and a couple of other extensions so I didn’t install them. Unfortunately, Firefox 2.0 introduced a horrible (for me) feature of a scrolling tab bar.

A scrolling tab bar is great if you have about … say … 10 tabs open at a time. I guess. I rarely have less than 30 tabs open. Yes, really. I can probably justify three quarters of those being left open all the time. [Random tip: that many tabs and Reload Every obviate the need for a separate RSS reader]

But I digress

30 odd tabs make the scrolling tab bar malarkey seem ridiculous. I can’t even remember if I have a tab of my customized slashdot home page open and if I did, it’s probably on the wrong end of a long long scroll; so I open another tab on this end. And so on and so forth. When I can’t see all the tabs I have open in one glance; my lousy memory dictates opening another tab anyway. And so the number of tabs open climb, even when they don’t need to.

Tab Mix Plus has a killer feature of being able to show all open tabs in multiple rows. None of this scrolling business. Wonderful. Never mind all the other nifty bonus features; that multi-row tab bar was what I really wanted. And then Tab Mix Plus (it seems like) started leaking memory on me.

Update: No, it’s not TMP but Firebug causing the memory leak nastiness and instability. W00t! I can live with a selective enabling of Firebug when I want it, living without TMP is enough to drive me to Opera. And yes, Firebug is still a beta so I should have checked that first.

Add to that a date mixup between the campus authorities and the department authorities (which I had to try sorting out), an impending supervisor meeting where I needed to mug up on several papers (but haven’t yet), random frustrations with the slow (glacial) pace of writing up and you can probably understand why I want this week to go off into a corner and die a quiet death. None of this kicking and screaming, don’t go all drama queen on me; just go away already.

And yet, the cotton wool escapism of a weekend of sports TV (Masters Snooker, Aussie Open and ODIs); not to mention the kickoff episode of American Idol await.

Has anyone realized that the near ubiquitous series of books titled For Dummies is tackling subjects no dummy should be allowed near with a ten foot pole?

I mean.. come on. Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies? What’s next? Nuclear Physics for Dummies? How to build your own fission reactor for Dummies? Mandatory reading material for all PHBs, Software Project Management for Dummies? Explosives, Running with Scissors and other amusements for Dummies?

It gets better (or more idiotic). Not to be outdone by Wiley, Penguin has charge of a series titled Complete Idiots Guide To …. With guaranteed hits such as “Idiots Guide to Dream Jobs”, “Idiots Guide to Body Language” and “Idiots Guide to Restoring Collector Cars”. Right. Because idiots are exactly the sort of people you’d trust with a collector car. How about an Idiots Guide to medicine in the A&E (ER to the Americans) while you’re at it? There was another title I had in mind; but that’s already been written.

And in the first part of my oddly titled post, A 28 year old who died of water intoxication. She was (and dear gawd, the jokes write themselves) taking part in a competition titled “Hold your wee for a Wii”. Or, when you think about it, “When there’s a Wii, there might be no wee”. Yes, I am eWiil. Also, an excess of water can kill. And you thought too much booze on a night out was bad for ya. Looks like even water isn’t safe anymore.

Heard of carbon finance? It’s

… resources provided to a project to purchase greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions

A dangerously high amount of greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere by our activities. To prevent global warming and other environmental catastrophes, we need to spend to reduce said emissions. That’s our carbon budget, the basis for the whole carbon finance idea. In Nicholas Stern’s climate change review; there is an estimate of 1% of global GDP required to reverse the adverse effects of global warming if we act now. If we leave it till too late, however, that number goes up to 15% – 20% of the global GDP. The old adage of prevention being a darn sight cheaper than cure applies, I suppose. Unfortunately, I very much doubt that humanity will collectively give a damn about greenhouse gases till it all goes pear shaped.

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Old aviation parlance, apparently. Anyone who read Biggles books should have known that already.

I spent days trying to figure out a structure and plan of attack for this problem I’ve been having recently. How does one automatically (by which I mean, with a computer program) determine the intent of a phrase (as opposed to a single word)? A single word is easy. Or at least, less difficult than it used to be. Phrases are still voodoo territory. Hell, even distinguishing a phrase amongst the adverbs and amibiguity in a sentence can be a non-trivial problem.

Plan of attack, ok… even if most of the things I tried didn’t work (leading to considerable frustration), it’s still decent research. A structure and reasons why it all collapsed like an incompetent civil engineer’s bridges? Nope, I was lacking a clue.

So my supervisor, anxious to hear what I had been busy discovering (I forgot to mention Ach, Grapevine and all the other distractions) scheduled a meeting for this afternoon. I had lots and lots of pieces of paper but no structure. I spent a fair bit of time this morning trying to impose some structure on the unholy mess that are my results and failed. Abjectly. Went to the meeting with pieces and fragments of research sticking out in all directions… rather like someone’s hair after a go by a lunatic hairdresser ODing on caffeine.

Sat in the chair. My supervisor waited expectantly.

And suddenly, I had this epiphany.

World peace, a cure for cancer or a solution to global warming it may not be – but my results suddenly and startlingly slipped into context. Everything made sense, for a fleeting moment in time.

If only this was the first time this happened… but it wasn’t. What becomes clear is that I need to either swipe the chair in my super’s office (because it has magical properties) or that I need to move into my supervisor’s office (because the environment has magical properties) or I need to be put on the spot more often.

Now, next time I need to take a notebook and write all that shit down when I’m spouting it. Apparently, only the blunt force trauma of a supervisor meeting enables the clarity of thought required for this piece of research.

A bride-to-be in Austria got a nasty surprise recently. No, it wasn’t size related. Pervs. When asked if she took the man next to her to be her lawful wedded husband, she said no. Neigh. Nein. Nada. Rumour has it that she was only joking. Freud may have thought otherwise. Unfortunately, the Austrian authorities conducting the wedding ceremony didn’t see the joke. They promptly stopped the ceremony and refused to restart. It seems that decorating the car with condoms (preferably unused) and other pieces of confetti for teh wedding funneh is a lost art. Even kissing the priest for shock effect is passe…No, this woman wanted to brighten up the morose demeanour of authority and ended up being bitch slapped instead. There has to be a lesson in there somewhere.

Also, what else could the authorities do? Imagine the precedent if they had accepted the bride-to-be’s frantic plea that it was all a joke, didn’t really mean it, I just wanted to make you guys laugh. Next thing you know, people will be turning around and doing a Britney Spears. “Oh, yeah. I said yes but I was joking. Please fix, kthx”. No, I will refrain from using a Britney Spears song title for an obvious attempt at humour.

And since I am in the mood for amusement, it seems that somewhere, a Brazilian judge doesn’t really understand this whole intarweb thing. And from there, we saunter straight into the observation that Ronaldo dumped his model girlfriend and shacked up with his dentist. If anyone wishes to speculate about the amount of drilling going on there, please refrain.

There is a school of thought out there, simply expressed, that says fewer features are better. This is classic 37 Signals ethos. If you’ve never heard of 37 Signals, well … long story short, they focus on minimalism in their online software offerings. Both figuratively and literally, you’re not missing much if you’ve not heard of them before. But their software is still very shiny and functional and most importantly, it works.

This is hardly a new concept; see paying more for fewer features. But from my point of view, putting in fewer features focuses the mind wonderfully on things that are most important (or core) to the application. It forces me to think about what I want to see in there, rather than running around with a gigantic shopping trolley in the feature supermarket and having a nasty shock at checkout.

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With the possible exception of The Silence of the Lambs, every effort is made to portray Hannibal Lector as someone merely tragically flawed rather than an out and out psychopathic monster. He is often shown acting appropriately for the hero of the piece instead of the villian. Therein lies the moral dilemma. You want him to go down. Yet, he’s smarter than the opposition and you feel sympathy for his torment at losing his family. James Hadley Chase might have had Hannibal Lector committing suicide or running heroically into a police cordon only to be gunned down in a hail of lead in the final moments. Not Thomas Harris. Hannibal Lector escapes, gets the girl (well, sort of) and lives, as far as we can tell, the carefree life of the wealthy-enough-to-not-care.

If I wanted to compare Thomas Harris in Hannibal Rising with a completely different author, an easy jump would take me to Without Remorse by Tom Clancy. Just substitute profiteering Hiwis for drug dealers and the plot line runs essentially the same way. John Clark never did cannibalism though… “A brouchette, cheeks and morels” may well be the new “I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti”.

Oh and major spoilers for Hannibal Rising follow..

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